Shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) rose sharply on Tuesday as investors anticipated the company’s Advancing AI 2026 conference, which begins today at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The two-day event is expected to officially launch AMD’s next-generation Zen 6 ‘Venice’ EPYC server processors and provide updates on its MI455X AI accelerator roadmap.
The stock’s gains built on momentum from earlier in the week following AMD’s announcement of an expanded strategic partnership with Microsoft. Under this agreement, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform will deploy AMD’s Helios Rackscale Solution, which integrates Instinct MI455X GPUs, sixth-generation EPYC ‘Venice’ CPUs, Pensando networking hardware, and ROCm software for running frontier AI model inference across Azure services and enterprise workloads. Azure will also introduce new virtual machine series powered by AMD EPYC processors and expand its deployment of Pensando data processing units to enhance Azure networking services.
AMD CEO Lisa Su stated that the companies are ‘extending their partnership across the full stack of AMD AI solutions on Azure.’ The Helios system is projected to begin shipping in the second half of 2026.
At the Advancing AI conference, which runs from July 22-23, Lisa Su will deliver the keynote address on Thursday at 9:30 AM Pacific time. AMD CTO Mark Papermaster has confirmed that the next-generation Zen 6 processors will be introduced at this event. The Venice EPYC processors will be the first data center chips from AMD built on TSMC’s 2nm process technology, featuring up to 256 cores, 1.6 TB/s of per-socket memory bandwidth, PCIe 6.0 support, and 16-channel DDR5. AMD claims these chips will provide up to 70% higher performance compared to the existing EPYC 9005 series.
The Helios rack-scale AI system pairs Venice CPUs with 72 Instinct MI455X accelerators, delivering up to 2.9 exaflops of AI compute power and 31 TB of HBM4 memory. An investor Q&A webcast is scheduled for Thursday at 12:30 PM.
Analyst sentiment has become increasingly positive ahead of the event. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon recently raised his price target for AMD to $600 and maintained a Buy rating. The consensus among 35 analysts covering the stock is a Strong Buy. AMD shares have increased more than 140% year to date, fueled by rising demand for AI infrastructure among hyperscale cloud providers.
