AMD to Invest $1 Billion in Meta Equity as Helios Racks Enter Testing
AMD's Oct. 27 release says it will invest $1 billion in Meta's equity offering and that Meta will deploy a custom Instinct GPU, but it gives no price, closing date or rack count.
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AMD's Helios racks. AMD says initial Helios rack-scale solutions are installed and being tested at Meta; the image is AMD's own and is not from Meta's site.
Image: AMD
Source · Press image from the AMD website, used for news reporting.
AMD said on Oct. 27 that it will invest $1 billion in Meta Platforms' equity offering, and that its initial Helios rack-scale solutions are installed and being tested at Meta, in a press release from the chipmaker.
The release gives no price, share count or closing date for the $1 billion, and it does not say how the money is structured. It describes Helios deployment at Meta only as heading for "a broader deployment in the near future", with no rack count and no site named.
AMD also said Meta will deploy a custom AMD Instinct GPU tuned to its own workloads. Meta was an early definition customer for the Instinct MI450 architecture, AMD said, and AMD said the collaboration is informing the future MI500 series and next-generation rack-scale systems.
What AMD already runs at Meta
According to AMD, Instinct GPUs are in production at Meta today for training, ranking and recommendation engines. EPYC server processors back the environments behind Meta's Muse personal AI agent, and Meta has deployed millions of EPYC chips across several generations. The companies are also working on a future EPYC generation code-named "Verano".
On software, AMD said it gave Day-0 support for Meta's Muse Spark Open models on Instinct GPUs, and optimized recommendation models on Instinct MI350X GPUs for large-scale training.
What a Helios Rack Is
AMD's Helios is a liquid-cooled rack that ties 72 GPUs into one scale-up domain over UALink over Ethernet, AMD's launch blog says. AMD's blueprint brochure describes 18 compute trays, each with four Instinct MI455X GPUs and one EPYC "Venice" CPU, plus 6 switch trays, sold and installed as a single unit.
AMD says one Helios rack links 72 GPUs in one scale-up domain, according to its blog and brochure; these are vendor figures.
Illustration (AI-generated)
AMD lists 432 GB of HBM4 on each MI455X and 31 TB of HBM4 per rack, so one rack can hold very large models and long contexts in memory. The release gives no count of racks at Meta, so the installed capacity cannot yet be turned into megawatts.
What the Meta Deal Means for Data Center Capacity
The release says the two companies are building and deploying infrastructure "at gigawatt scale" but states no figure in gigawatts, so the power draw of the Helios racks at Meta cannot be derived from it. For data-center planners, the signal is that AMD says initial Helios racks are installed at Meta and in testing.
The $1 billion is a separate stake from NVIDIA's. As Voltgrid reported, NVIDIA plans to put $3 billion into the same offering.
That offering is part of the raise covered in Meta's $95 billion funding plan. Both AMD and NVIDIA have now said they will invest in the same offering.
What is not confirmed yet
AMD did not say when the investment settles or on what terms. The release does not state how many Helios racks are installed, in which data centers, or when testing ends. Whether the custom Instinct GPU shares the MI450 design or is a separate part is also open. AMD reports third-quarter results on Nov. 3.
