Partnering with Microsoft to expand AI chip collaboration! AMD responds with a rise

According to Zhitong Finance APP, thanks to Microsoft's (MSFT.US) plan to deploy AMD (AMD.US) chips and CPUs on its Azure cloud platform for artificial intelligence (AI) inference tasks, AMD's stock rose over 3% in early trading on Monday.

It is reported that AMD announced the expansion of its cooperation with Microsoft, covering AMD's GPUs, CPUs, networking technologies, and software ecosystem, and will further integrate related technologies on the Microsoft Azure platform. Microsoft will deploy AMD Helios rack-level solutions to provide cutting-edge AI model inference capabilities for Microsoft itself and its AI clients, supporting Azure AI services. The two companies stated that Microsoft Azure will also introduce two new virtual machine (VM) series products based on AMD EPYC CPUs and expand the deployment scale of Pensando data processing units (DPUs).

AMD stated that the Helios solution integrates Instinct MI455X GPUs, AMD EPYC Venice CPUs, Pensando networking technology, and ROCm software into an open, integrated rack-level platform designed for large-scale AI training and inference tasks. AI inference refers to the process where a trained AI model uses its acquired knowledge to make predictions or draw conclusions about new, unseen data.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella stated, "Through our collaboration with AMD, we are leveraging AMD Helios to expand the Azure infrastructure product portfolio, providing customers with the performance, scale, and choice needed to build and run the next generation of AI applications."

It is worth mentioning that AMD's annual flagship AI conference "Advancing AI 2026" will be held in San Francisco, USA, from July 22 to 23 local time. UBS, in a recent report, stated that the timing of AMD's Advancing AI event is just before Intel's earnings report, about two weeks before AMD's own earnings report. Investors are focused on whether the company can expand its AI customer base beyond OpenAI and Meta to more manufacturers, but UBS predicts that the focus of this event will be on the release of the technology roadmap rather than a significant adjustment to financial forecasting models.

On the customer side, UBS still believes that Amazon (AMZN.US) will become a core major customer for MI450x, and Anthropic may also be on the customer list, but the firm advises investors to lower their expectations for the announcement of new customers at this event. In addition to potential customer collaboration announcements, UBS expects AMD to provide a comprehensive update on its AI product line planning: disclosing more details about MI450x Helios, MI500 series, possibly releasing information related to the MI600 roadmap in advance, and potentially elaborating on strategies for emerging distributed inference computing loads.

In addition to AI acceleration chips, UBS expects AMD to provide a more optimistic assessment of the server CPU market space. The last time AMD officially updated the overall potential market size (TAM) for server CPUs was in the Q1 2026 earnings report, when it estimated that the market size could reach $120 billion by 2030, and since then, industry data has significantly strengthened