AMD shares fell 2.3 per cent on 12 October after it introduced a blueprint for its Helion AI rack, while Nvidia also declined, MarketWatch reported.
Key points
- AMD and Nvidia shares fell for a fourth consecutive trading day on 12 October.
- Helion is a reference design for racks that can use AMD CPUs alone or combine CPUs with its GPUs.
- An analyst described revenue potential from the companies’ new announcements as distant.
Helion arrives at the San Jose summit
AMD unveiled Helion at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose on 12 October, Yahoo Finance reported. The rack server design is intended to give AMD’s partners and customers a blueprint for building platforms with different mixes of processors, according to the report.
The Open Compute Project promotes shared specifications and open-source designs for companies building products used in AI infrastructure. AMD introduced a blueprint for its upcoming Helion chip rack. The company has positioned the design around the computing requirements of agentic AI.
AI Affairs previously covered AMD’s Helion design and its CPU and GPU options. Those options allow partners to configure racks around different workloads, rather than use a single processor arrangement for every system, according to AMD’s description reported by Yahoo Finance.
EPYC and Instinct options for Helion
AMD said one Helion configuration can use its sixth-generation EPYC CPUs throughout the rack for agentic AI tasks and servers. Another combines CPUs with Instinct MI350P GPUs to provide a broader AI platform. The choice places AMD’s server processors alongside its accelerators in the design offered to partners.
Dan McNamara, AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of compute and enterprise AI, said in a company statement that agentic AI involves several kinds of work, including enterprise applications, running code and co-ordinating workflows. He said Helion brings together EPYC processors, open software and adaptable rack designs so partners can build around customer requirements and available power.
Nvidia offers rack server reference designs of its own, including NVL72 servers, Yahoo Finance reported. Both chipmakers introduced hardware and software designs for future AI data centres, MarketWatch reported. For AMD, the Helion configurations put its CPUs and GPUs into the rack-level designs that customers and partners can use when planning systems.
Nvidia and AMD shares extend declines
The 12 October declines marked a fourth consecutive trading day of losses for both AMD and Nvidia. An analyst cited by MarketWatch viewed the revenue potential from the new hardware and software announcements as distant.
AMD’s latest reported quarterly revenue rose 50 per cent to $11.5 billion, while earnings per share increased 245 per cent. The company exceeded analysts’ revenue and earnings estimates and gave an outlook for the current quarter that was better than analysts had expected.
Nvidia brought in $96.2 billion of revenue in its prior quarter, according to Yahoo Finance. AMD shares had risen roughly 182 per cent year to date, compared with a 25 per cent gain for Nvidia over the same period.
