Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) saw its shares fall 3% on Thursday, even as the chipmaker unveiled a series of aggressive moves in the artificial intelligence hardware space at its Advancing AI 2026 conference. The company announced a technical partnership with Cerebras Systems to develop a disaggregated AI inference solution, and it officially launched its Helios rack-scale AI system, which is already backed by major cloud and AI customers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Oracle, and Anthropic. The Helios system is designed to directly challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the high-performance computing market for AI workloads.
The joint solution integrates AMD’s Helios rackscale infrastructure with Cerebras’ wafer-scale engine to handle diverse inference workloads. AMD Helios will manage prompts and large context windows, while Cerebras’ technology handles token generation, aiming for up to five times higher tokens per second per watt compared to a Cerebras-only configuration, based on July 2026 modeling. Cerebras plans to deploy AMD Helios systems across its data centers, with the joint solution expected to be available through Cerebras Cloud in the second half of 2026.
This announcement came just a day after AMD struck a deal to invest up to $5 billion in AI startup Anthropic, contingent on deployment milestones, with Anthropic agreeing to purchase up to 2 gigawatts of AMD’s next-generation Instinct MI450 chips starting in early 2027. AMD CEO Lisa Su described Helios as the industry’s "highest performance AI rack," and projected the AI accelerator market will reach approximately $1.4 trillion by 2030, approaching the size of today’s entire semiconductor market. Early benchmarks suggest Helios outperforms Nvidia’s Vera Rubin system in several metrics, intensifying the AI hardware arms race.
Despite these announcements, AMD’s stock declined 3% while Cerebras shares rose 3.9%. Cerebras, which debuted on the market in May, has experienced volatility; after pricing its IPO at $185, it surged to an intraday high above $386 before retreating, and traded at $217.78 after Thursday’s rally. The company previously announced a more than $10 billion deal with OpenAI to provide 750 megawatts of AI computing capacity through 2028.
