HPE says its implementation of AMD’s ‘Helios’ rack-scale platform will include what it’s calling the ‘first scale-up switch to deliver optimized performance for AI workloads over standard Ethernet,’ thanks to development work it’s doing with Broadcom.
HPE said Tuesday that it will be “one of the first OEMs” to adopt AMD’s GPU-accelerated AI server rack that is set to rival Nvidia’s heavily anticipated Vera Rubin platform next year.
Announced at HPE Discover 2025 in Barcelona, Spain, the Houston, Texas-based server giant said that it plans to make AMD’s “Helios” rack-scale platform, powered by 72 of the chip designer’s Instinct MI455X GPUs, available to cloud service providers, including so-called “neoclouds,” next year for large-scale AI training and inference workloads.
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HPE’s plan with the double-wide Helios rack was revealed less than a month after AMD CEO Lisa Su said the chip designer sees a “very clear path” to gaining double-digit share in the Nvidia-dominated data center AI market, with expectations to make tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue from its Instinct GPUs and related products in 2027.
Nvidia, by contrast, said less than two weeks ago that it has “visibility” to $500 billion in revenue from the beginning of this year to the end of next year for its Blackwell and next-generation Rubin platforms, which includes the Vera Rubin platform.
HPE’s Helios Specs And Features
A single Helios rack is expected to provide 260 TBps of scale-up bandwidth, up to 2.9 exaflops of FP4 performance, 31 TB of HBM4 memory and 1.4 PBps of memory bandwidth to support massive AI models that reach a trillion parameters, according to HPE. These figures line up with the initial specifications AMD provided for Helios in June.
HPE said its implementation of Helios, which is based on Open Compute Project specifications, will include what it’s calling the “first scale-up switch to deliver optimized performance for AI workloads over standard Ethernet.” This will enable high-speed connections between each rack’s 72 GPUs.
The company said its Juniper Networking subsidiary is developing the scale-up networking switch with semiconductor giant Broadcom specifically for its Helios offerings. Powered by Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 networking chip, the switch will be based on the Ultra Accelerator Link over Ethernet standard, which tech giants and dozens of other companies are supporting as an alternative to Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect technology.
HPE said the switch will take advantage of its “AI-native automation and assurance capabilities to simplify network operations for faster deployment and overall cost savings.” It added that the switch “minimizes vendor lock-in and enables swifter feature updates.”
The Helios rack will also use AMD’s ROCm software and Pensando networking technology to “speed innovation and help lower total cost of ownership,” according to HPE.
Instinct Isn’t A Broad Channel Play For AMD Yet
While AMD has invested a significant amount of money to challenge Nvidia head on, the company told CRN earlier this year that it isn’t ready yet to make Instinct GPUs a broad channel play, instead opting to work with select channel partners for now.
That’s because the company is focused on “high-touch” engagements with its biggest customers—which include Meta,OpenAIMicrosoft and xAI—to ensure they have an optimal experience, according to AMD executive Kevin Lensing.
“The challenge with doing a channel enablement on Instinct is we can’t enable a model where we have to go one-to-many if we can’t touch them all and deliver a great experience,” said Lensing, who runs Americas and hyperscaler sales, in a June interview.
Among those select partners is International Computing Concepts, a Northbrook, Ill.-based systems integrator that was named No. 1 in CRN’s Fast Growth 150 this yearwith much of its triple-digit growth over the past two years being fueled by its Nvidia business.
Alexey Stolyar, CTO at International Computing Concepts, told CRN on Monday that he’s seeing “some momentum” for Instinct-based server solutions from neocloud customers, referring to a rising group of smaller cloud service providers focused on AI compute.
“[AMD is] really going after very specific opportunities that they can hand-hold and make sure [they can] provide the best performance and so on. I think once they get a little bit of a feel for that and it becomes a little bit more solidified, they’ll start pushing it down the partner community,” he said.
Partner: Scale-Up Networking Could Be Challenging
Stolyar said while he likes the idea of AMD’s Helios rack supporting an open standard like Ultra Accelerator Link over Ethernet, he cautioned that the tech industry could experience hurdles in taking full advantage of it.
The solution provider executive based this assertion on the challenges his company faced in helping customers utilize the scale-up capabilities of Nvidia’s rack-scale platforms like the GB200, saying that “there’s not a lot of workloads that can really max it out.”
The exception to that rule would be hyperscalers, who have the right level of expertise to max out the scale-out bandwidth for massive AI training jobs they’re running, he added.
“There’s not a lot of people who actually know how to do it. But that being said, we don’t see a lot of use for it,” Stolyar said.
The executive instead expects most companies to take advantage of the scale-out capabilities of rack-scale platforms, which may not offer the same level of bandwidth but can enable hundreds of more GPUs to connect to each other on the same fabric.
“Sure, it’s a little bit slower, but as long as you’re not filling up that full bandwidth, you’re fine. And even if you are filling up that full bandwidth, your access to a large GPU pool is much larger now,” Stolyar said.