AMD Invests $1 Billion in Meta as Initial Helios Systems Undergo Testing

Key Facts

AMD said on October 27 that initial Helios systems are “installed and being tested” at Meta, and announced a $1 billion investment in the company’s share offering. The announcement puts the partnership at an early implementation stage, but does not mean broad operational deployment of the platform has begun. AMD said Meta uses Instinct accelerators in production, alongside millions of EPYC processors deployed across its infrastructure. It said Muse Spark Open is supported on Instinct accelerators, while Muse Glimmer runs on Ryzen AI PCs and Radeon accelerators. These steps combine computing supply with support for Meta’s models as the company expands its data center investments.

The collaboration predates the October announcement; in July, AMD said Meta had early access to Helios and was testing the platform in its labs, with engineers from both companies working on it side by side. AMD said millions of EPYC processors had been deployed across Meta’s infrastructure, and that Meta is a major customer working with it on sixth-generation Venice. MI350 accelerators also expanded the collaboration to include AI training, including recommendation and ranking models used on Meta’s platforms. Helios combines MI455X Instinct accelerators, sixth-generation EPYC processors, Pensando networking and ROCm software in a unified rack-scale architecture. This configuration defines the scope of the platform Meta is testing, while AMD has not announced a broader deployment size or a specific timeline.

On the software side, AMD published details on October 15 of Muse Spark Open support on MI350X and MI355X accelerators. The model has 816 billion parameters, including 42 billion active per token, with a context window of 1 million tokens. The company said it can run on a single node with 8 MI350X or MI355X accelerators using vLLM. In a test published by AMD, throughput on the MI350X using the MXFP4 format rose from 206 to 350 output tokens per second at 4 concurrent requests, and from 719 to 1,180 at 32 requests. These are AMD’s published test results for the model, not a measure of the performance of Meta’s Helios systems.

The partnership announcement coincided with results showing Meta revenue of $64.601 billion in the third quarter of 2026, up 26% from $51.242 billion a year earlier. Capital spending was $34.91 billion, including principal payments on finance leases, while operating cash flow reached $32.79 billion. Free cash flow was negative $2.12 billion. Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast range to $135–145 billion from $130–145 billion previously. It also forecast fourth-quarter revenue of between $73 billion and $76 billion, placing the new infrastructure test within an expanding spending plan.

On October 26, Meta announced two underwritten public offerings worth about $35 billion and said it planned an at-the-market share sale program of about $60 billion after Class C shares begin trading. No agreement had been reached on the program, and its terms, final size and timing had not been determined; the company said it was not expected to begin before the first quarter of 2027. Meta said AMD, NVIDIA and Broadcom had each expressed nonbinding interest in buying Class A common shares worth up to a combined $5 billion. NVIDIA separately announced a $3 billion investment in Meta’s offering and an expanded collaboration on Muse models. Meta said it intends to expand deployment of Vera Rubin infrastructure, Vera processors, Spectrum-X networks and BlueField-4, adding another supplier to its computing infrastructure plans.

AMD shares rose 3.2% in morning trading on October 27 following the announcement of the expanded partnership, according to an Investing.com report. The stock had closed at $531.28 on October 26, while Meta shares closed at $630.56 the same day. The closing prices show where both stocks stood before the trading covered in the report. AMD is scheduled to report third-quarter results on November 3, 2026, after the market close, followed by a management call to discuss the results at 5 p.m. Eastern time. The next financial report comes days after the Helios testing announcement, while the company has not set a date for broader platform deployment.