Investing.com -- Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) shares jumped 5% on Monday following a high-stakes expansion of its strategic partnership with Microsoft, placing AMD’s next-gen silicon at the heart of Azure’s cloud infrastructure.

The centerpiece of the deal is Microsoft’s wide-scale deployment of the AMD Helios Rackscale Solution to drive frontier model AI inference across Azure services and enterprise customer workloads. Helios—an integrated power-rack combining AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, 6th Gen EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software—is scheduled to begin shipping in the second half of 2026.

As part of the rollout, Azure is launching two new virtual machine lines powered by AMD’s “Venice” architecture: the HDv2 series tailored for agentic AI and data processing, and the HXv2 series built for heavy-duty semiconductor design.

The partnership also deepens AMD’s presence in Azure’s networking stack. Microsoft will deploy AMD Pensando DPUs across its AI backend while integrating AMD silicon directly with Azure Boost to push cloud networking performance to its limits.

"AMD and Microsoft have spent years building high-performance infrastructure together, and today we’re extending that partnership across the full stack of AMD AI solutions on Azure," said Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD.

The expanded deployment cements AMD’s position as a core provider in hyperscale cloud infrastructure as the race for enterprise AI compute capacity accelerates.