Join hands with Microsoft (MSFT.US) to expand AI chip cooperation! AMD (AMD.US) rose in response

The Zhitong Finance App learned that thanks to the news that Microsoft (MSFT.US) plans to deploy AMD (AMD.US) chips and CPUs on its Azure cloud platform for artificial intelligence (AI) inference tasks, as of press release, AMD's US stock market rose more than 3% at the beginning of Monday.

According to reports, AMD announced that the company and Microsoft will expand the scope of cooperation to cover AMD's GPU, CPU, network technology and software ecosystem, and will further integrate related technologies on the Microsoft Azure platform. Microsoft will deploy AMD Helios rack-scale solutions to provide cutting-edge AI model inference capabilities for Microsoft itself and its AI customers, and support Azure AI services. The two companies said that Microsoft Azure will also add two new virtual machine (VM) series products based on AMD EPYC CPUs and expand the deployment scale of Pensando data processing units (DPUs).

AMD said the Helios solution integrates the Instinct MI455X GPU, AMD EPYC Venice CPU, Pensando network technology, and ROCM software into an open, integrated rack-scale platform designed for large-scale AI training and inference tasks. AI inference refers to the process of using the knowledge a trained artificial intelligence model has mastered to predict or draw conclusions from new, unseen data.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said, “Through our partnership with AMD Helios, we are expanding our Azure infrastructure product portfolio to provide 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 “Innovative AI 2026” will be held from July 22 to 23, local time in San Francisco, USA. UBS said in a recent report that AMD's Promised AI event was held before Intel's earnings report was released, about two weeks before AMD's own earnings report was released. Investors' focus is on whether the company can expand its AI customer base to more vendors other than OpenAI and Meta, but UBS determined that the event will focus on releasing a technical roadmap rather than drastically adjusting the financial calculation model.

On the customer side, UBS still believes that Amazon (AMZN.US) will become the core major customer of the Mi450x, and Anthropic may also be on the customer list, but the bank advises investors to lower their expectations for the official announcement of new customers at this event. In addition to the official announcement of potential customer cooperation, UBS expects AMD to fully update the AI product line plan: disclose more details about the MI450x Helios and MI500 series, or release information related to the MI600 roadmap ahead of time, and possibly explain layout strategies for emerging distributed inference computing power loads.

In addition to AI acceleration chips, UBS expects AMD to make a more optimistic judgment on the server CPU market space. The last time AMD officially updated the overall potential market size (TAM) for server CPUs was in the financial report for the first quarter of 2026. At the time, it was estimated that the market size could reach 120 billion US dollars in 2030, and since then, industry data has increased significantly.