- AMD Helios MI450 rack shined at OCP Summit with dense AI setup
- 72-GPU system showcased new OCP design and evolution of PCIe Gen6 storage
- Meta’s customized version of Helios contrasts with different power and network strategy
At the recent OCP 2025 Summit, AMD’s Helios MI450 rack proved to be one of the standout systems at the show.
serve the homePatrick Kennedy was there and took some photos of the shiny 72-GPU rack that attracted engineers and assistants who wandered too close to its orbit.
“While the showroom was open, there were crowds of people looking at this every time it passed by,” Kennedy said.
The Helios system on display was AMD’s reference design and was valued at approximately $3 million.
At the top of the rack were the management switch and power shelves, followed by a stack of computing trays.
The design follows the OCP ORv3 wide rack standard, with a network switch section centrally located between the upper and lower compute layers.
According to Kennedy, the EDSFF E1.S SSDs were visible on both sides of the compute trays, reflecting the move away from 2.5-inch U.2 connectors in the PCIe Gen6 generation.
Below the trays were more power shelves, which powered the 72 GPUs arranged within the frame.
The design seemed to focus on data center deployment, not just display purposes, with clear attention to power delivery and service access.
“AMD has a deal with OpenAI for the MI400 series. They announced a 50,000 GPU deal with Oracle. Additionally, Meta has a custom rack that at first glance may look similar to AMD’s Helios rack, but the power sharing and scalable networking in the rack is very different,” Kennedy noted.
Meta’s custom rack, which uses a Rittal frame, was in front of the AMD rack at the OCP Summit. It had four 64-port Ethernet switches on top instead of power, used more DACs than multimode fiber, and moved power delivery to a sidecar via a horizontal busbar connected to both the top and center of the rack.
The contrasting designs between AMD and Meta show how flexible the Helios concept can be when scaling across carriers.
“What is clear is that the AMD Helios AI rack has convinced several large AI shops to invest in the solution,” Kennedy concluded.
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