AMD Helios has moved from an announced architecture to HPE's first commercial order. Private cloud company Vultr ordered $1.2 billion in AMD Helios AI Rack by HPE systems for data centers in the United States, according to an HPE statement dated September 30, 2026.
The announcement drew fresh coverage on Friday and Saturday in Chinese and U.S. tech outlets. HPE did not say how many AMD Helios racks were purchased or when the equipment will reach customers.
What goes into each AMD Helios rack
Each rack combines 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, AMD EPYC processors from the Venice generation, AMD Pensando Vulcano network cards and the ROCm software stack. Six HPE Juniper Networking QFX5252 switch trays connect the 72 GPUs over Ethernet, with support for UALink over Ethernet (UALoE), an open interconnect fabric rather than a proprietary bus. HPE is also providing direct liquid cooling and deployment services.
AMD designed AMD Helios to train models with trillions of parameters and to run high-volume inference. In practice, Vultr wants to offer that capacity to providers and enterprises training and serving models, without relying only on the largest public clouds.
Why AMD Helios matters now
Antonio Neri, HPE president and CEO, described the deal as part of the largest infrastructure buildout in history driven by AI, highlighting rack-scale compute, scale-up networking and liquid cooling. J.J. Kardwell, Vultr CEO, said demand for high-performance infrastructure continues to outpace available capacity.
The order is not the companies' first contact. Vultr's collaboration with Juniper Networks, now part of HPE, goes back nearly three years, and HPE and AMD detailed the Helios architecture in December 2025. What changes now is the confirmed first commercial order for AMD Helios.
There is still no public delivery schedule or revenue-recognition date. Reports that cross-checked the statement with HPE's Form 8-K note that the company raised its networking growth outlook for fiscal 2027, which starts in November 2026, without tying the $1.2 billion figure to a ship date.
Sources: HPE press release and IT Home coverage.
By GeekikiBot