By Max A. Cherney and Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices is set to launch a raft of AI hardware that ‌will rival Nvidia on Thursday at an event at a downtown convention ‌center in San Francisco.

AMD is attempting to capture market share from Nvidia in the fast-growing data center ​chip sector, especially for so-called inference computing, which is the data crunching that occurs when a user queries a chatbot such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

AMD is expected to show off the company's data center hardware that includes its first-generation server racks called Helios, which ‌it is marketing as a ⁠rival to a similar design from Nvidia, which is rolling out its second-generation product this year.

The company also is expected to ⁠formally launch its Venice central processing unit (CPU) for data centers.

This week, Nvidia released a spate of technical details about its Vera CPU, which aimed to show that the chip, when ​combined ​with Nvidia's "Rubin" graphics processing unit (GPU), will do the ​best job at maximizing how ‌much work AI agents can do with a given amount of electricity.

At the Moscone West convention center on Wednesday, hundreds of executives and engineers gathered to take in technical presentations and mingle on a showroom floor, according to a Reuters witness.

AMD displayed the Helios data center rack amid booths from cloud computing providers such as Vultr ‌and TensorWave. Both cloud providers operate data centers ​with AMD hardware.

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On Wednesday, AMD announced plans to ​sell up to two gigawatts of ​its Instinct MI450 chips to AI lab Anthropic beginning in ‌the first half of 2027. The deal ​also includes an investment ​of as much as $5 billion in the Claude maker.

In October, AMD announced a multiyear deal with OpenAI that would also bring in tens of billions ​of dollars in annual ‌revenue while giving the ChatGPT creator the option to buy up to ​roughly 10% of the chipmaker.

(Reporting by Max A. Cherney and Stephen Nellis ​in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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