US AI Policy Debate Reignited by Kimi K3, Where Anthropic is Lagging, AMD’s New Helios AI System

**Akash Pasricha** (0:13)
Welcome, everyone, to The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Tuesday, July 21st. Today on the show, we are unpacking AMD's new rack scale system, Helios. We'll then get into the policy debate around Kimi K3 and open weight models that is sweeping through Silicon Valley and DC.
We've got two experts coming on who are gonna help us understand both sides of that conversation.
We'll also get into our exclusive reporting on human data labeling company Mercor and how concentrated its revenue is. And to close out the show, we'll take a look at why Anthropic is lagging behind survival AI model makers when it comes to voice agents. It's gonna be a great show, so let's get right on into it.
AMD is preparing to ship its first rack-scale AI system, Helios, taking direct aim at Nvidia. I want to bring on Austin Lyons. He is a senior analyst at Creative Strategies. Austin, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.

**Austin Lyons** (1:11)
Hey, thanks for having me, Akash. Always good to be here.

**Akash Pasricha** (1:14)
Okay, so Helios, break it down for us. What is it that AMD is launching here?

**Austin Lyons** (1:19)
Sure. So Helios, this is AMD's first rack for AI inference and also for AI training.
So previously, AMD has had GPUs, they've had CPUs, they've had networking, but they've only been like eight GPUs connected together in a server. Now, AMD is launching an entire rack full of 72 GPUs, all of it interconnected, all of them acting as one system, and they're really targeting frontier model inference.

**Akash Pasricha** (1:46)
Okay. So they've never had any kind of a rack system. This is something that only Nvidia has had before? What's the competitive landscape here?

**Austin Lyons** (1:55)
Yeah. You could technically get racks of AMD stuff, but really the size of system was like eight GPUs in a server, and you could put these servers in a rack, but they weren't all acting as one big brain, if you will.
Now, Nvidia has had NBL72 with the VeriRubin, and this is AMD's opportunity to finally have a rack scale system that all behaves as one, and therefore can really squeeze out as many frontier tokens as possible out of one system.

**Akash Pasricha** (2:29)
In other words, when you bought an AMD server, you could build a rack on your own, but that was all up to the customer to do. That was all integration they had to basically invest in themselves. AMD is saying we'll sell it as a whole product together for the first time.
I wonder, what does that mean for pricing? I mean, does AMD, do you think that they offer a discount on like, if I were to get eight servers, put them together in a rack, like is it just eight times one cost of one server, or is there discount pricing? How does it work?

**Austin Lyons** (3:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, good question. And so they do have partners that would build these racks for their customers, like a Dell or a Super Micro, but they weren't all connected on what's called a scale up fabric, which is just like all these GPUs talking really quickly together. And so now, now that they're all a rack and they can all talk really quickly together, they can act as one system. So what does that mean from pricing? I mean, at the end of the day, AMD has always been a little bit behind Nvidia. Nvidia always has premium pricing.
AMD is trying to come and offer competitive performance, but also generally a little bit lower price. And so I think when you think about pricing, you can think about Nvidia type prices, but just a little bit less so that they can be as competitive and obviously have a way to get into the door with customers.

**Akash Pasricha** (3:57)
So how competitive is this with Nvidia? Is it as good as what Nvidia offers at the end of the day with their racks?

**Austin Lyons** (4:04)
Yeah, good question. I mean, it obviously depends on who you ask. If you ask Nvidia, they'll say no. If you ask AMD, they'll say yes.

**Akash Pasricha** (4:09)
I'm asking Austin Lyons, Austin Lyons.

**Austin Lyons** (4:12)
Yeah, totally. No, I do think it's competitive. I think there's this concept of a Pareto frontier. And at the end of the day, you're trying to squeeze as many tokens out as possible and you want those tokens to be as fast as possible. And usually there's a trade-off. The faster the system responds, kind of the fewer tokens that it'll generate at a time.
And Nvidia and AMD are both pushing the frontier here. And AMD is going to be competitive at certain spots on that frontier. You can get that same level of performance from AMD.