Dr Lisa Su’s speech at CES 2026 was not just a standard product presentation. The presence on stage of representatives from OpenAI, Blue Origin and the Director of the White House Office of Science Policy clearly signals a shift in the company’s positioning.
AMD is no longer just a component supplier, becoming a strategic pillar of the ‘Genesis Mission’ – the US initiative to advance science through AI. This sends a clear signal to the market: in the geopolitical technology race, Santa Clara takes a front-row seat.
The main focus of the speech was the prediction that global computing power will exceed 10 JottaFLOPS in the next five years. AMD’s answer to this challenge is the Helios platform.
This unified rack system, integrating Instinct accelerators, EPYC processors and Pensando networking solutions, is expected to offer performance of 3 EksaFLOPS in a single rack. However, it is the 2027 announcements that have electrified the data centre sector. The upcoming Instinct MI500 accelerators, based on the CDNA 6 architecture and 2-nanometre process, are expected to deliver a thousand-fold increase in AI performance over current solutions, setting an aggressive new path forward for cloud infrastructure.
An equally important battle is being fought over the ‘edge of the network’ and tools for developers. The introduction of the Ryzen AI Halo, a developer MiniPC with a 60 TFLOPS GPU, is an attempt to lower the entry threshold for AI engineers who need local computing power.
Complementing this strategy are the new Ryzen AI 400 processors for consumer and business laptops, which will debut in offerings from leading manufacturers such as Dell and Lenovo as early as the first quarter of this year.
The whole ecosystem is tied together by software, hitherto the Achilles’ heel of Nvidia’s competitors. The new ROCm 7.2, integrated with the popular ComfyUI, is seeing spikes in downloads, suggesting that developers are beginning to realistically adopt AMD’s open environment.
The range closes the gaming segment with the Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor, which is expected to compete effectively with Intel’s top chips thanks to 3D V-Cache technology.
