AMD's Latest Bid for AI Supremacy: Building a 'Yotta-Scale' Future
At the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), AMD CEO Lisa Su unveiled her company's ambitious plan to revolutionize artificial intelligence computing. The industry is on the cusp of entering the "yotta-scale" era, where unprecedented growth in training and inference capabilities will be pushed to extreme limits.
Su cited ChatGPT as a catalyst for this shift, noting that AI adoption has grown from about one million users to over 1 billion active users in just a few years. She predicts that by 2026, the number of active users will soar to over five billion, making AI an indispensable part of daily life.
However, Su warned that current computing power is still woefully inadequate to support the full potential of AI. To address this, AMD is building its own foundation from scratch – integrating hardware and software components into a single, end-to-end platform.
The company's answer lies in Helios, a rack-scale data center platform designed for trillion-parameter AI training and large-scale inference. This powerhouse system delivers up to three AIs exaflops, leveraging Instinct MI455X accelerators, EPYC CPUs, Pensando networking, and the ROCm software ecosystem.
AMD is also investing heavily in its on-device AI capabilities, with Ryzen AI Max+ platforms capable of supporting complex models with over 128 billion parameters using unified memory. This move underscores Su's vision of making AI a local experience for billions of users.
Moreover, AMD has pledged to strengthen national AI leadership through public-private initiatives like the Genesis Mission, a US government-backed program aimed at advancing AI research and development. The company's involvement in this effort will see its AMD-powered supercomputers deployed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
As the stakes grow higher, AMD is committed to developing the talent required for this new era of computing. With a $150 million education initiative, Su signaled that sustaining yotta-scale ambition will depend just as much on cultivating a skilled workforce as it does on advancing silicon technology.
With its all-encompassing approach to AI computing, AMD is setting the stage for what promises to be an explosive and transformative year in the world of artificial intelligence.
At the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), AMD CEO Lisa Su unveiled her company's ambitious plan to revolutionize artificial intelligence computing. The industry is on the cusp of entering the "yotta-scale" era, where unprecedented growth in training and inference capabilities will be pushed to extreme limits.
Su cited ChatGPT as a catalyst for this shift, noting that AI adoption has grown from about one million users to over 1 billion active users in just a few years. She predicts that by 2026, the number of active users will soar to over five billion, making AI an indispensable part of daily life.
However, Su warned that current computing power is still woefully inadequate to support the full potential of AI. To address this, AMD is building its own foundation from scratch – integrating hardware and software components into a single, end-to-end platform.
The company's answer lies in Helios, a rack-scale data center platform designed for trillion-parameter AI training and large-scale inference. This powerhouse system delivers up to three AIs exaflops, leveraging Instinct MI455X accelerators, EPYC CPUs, Pensando networking, and the ROCm software ecosystem.
AMD is also investing heavily in its on-device AI capabilities, with Ryzen AI Max+ platforms capable of supporting complex models with over 128 billion parameters using unified memory. This move underscores Su's vision of making AI a local experience for billions of users.
Moreover, AMD has pledged to strengthen national AI leadership through public-private initiatives like the Genesis Mission, a US government-backed program aimed at advancing AI research and development. The company's involvement in this effort will see its AMD-powered supercomputers deployed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
As the stakes grow higher, AMD is committed to developing the talent required for this new era of computing. With a $150 million education initiative, Su signaled that sustaining yotta-scale ambition will depend just as much on cultivating a skilled workforce as it does on advancing silicon technology.
With its all-encompassing approach to AI computing, AMD is setting the stage for what promises to be an explosive and transformative year in the world of artificial intelligence.