Schneider Electric and AMD today announced a jointly developed and validated reference design for the AMD Helios rackscale solution that provides a scalable blueprint for deploying high-density AI environments faster and with reduced risk and complexity
The reference design marks the first milestone of the collaboration between Schneider Electric and AMD and delivers upon the companies’ joint focus to create an easier path to AI Factory deployment.
The new reference design is the first ever developed to support high-density AI workloads on the Helios rackscale solution, which is powered by AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, AMD Pensando Vulcano NICs and the open ROCm software ecosystem. AMD Helios is designed to deliver breakthrough AI performance through advances in compute, interconnect bandwidth, memory capacity and system-level integration, allowing customers to run larger, more complex AI workloads faster while optimising power and efficiency.
As AI workloads push data centre infrastructure to unprecedented limits, reference designs provide data centre architects and operators with tested, scalable designs proven to handle new power densities, thermal requirements and operational complexity. By modelling data centre physical infrastructure performance, these pre validated blueprints help shorten the planning process by defining how power, cooling and IT infrastructure should be organised to build a reliable, scalable and AI ready data centre. The AMD Helios reference design includes information on four technical areas: facility power, facility cooling, IT space and lifecycle software.
“Today organisations require comprehensive, AI-ready reference designs that can take them from planning to deployment faster and with less risk,” said Manish Kumar, Executive Vice President, Secure Power & Data Centers at Schneider Electric.
“Through our collaboration with AMD, we’re delivering an engineering-backed reference design that bridges the gap between advanced AI compute platforms, energy tech and real-world data centre implementation, enabling customers to deploy scalable, high-density AI environments with greater confidence, efficiency and speed.”
“AI infrastructure is rapidly moving to full-scale AI factories, and that requires compute, networking, power and cooling to be designed together from the start,” said Forrest Norrod, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Data Centre Solutions Business Group, AMD.
“AMD Helios provides an open, rack-scale architecture built to deliver the performance, efficiency and flexibility required for next-generation AI workloads. By working with Schneider Electric to create a validated reference design, we are giving customers a practical blueprint to accelerate high-density AI deployments, reduce integration risk and scale with greater confidence and efficiency.”
Reference design accelerates AMD Helios Deployment
The new collaboration brings together AMD AI platform innovation and Schneider Electric’s expertise in power, cooling, and digital infrastructure, creating a more tightly integrated approach to deploying both greenfield AI factories and high-density retrofit environments. The reference design supports:
• Modular, multi-cluster environments, featuring AI clusters of up to 10.4 MW IT capacity for greenfield deployments.
• High-density AI workloads up to 246 kW per rack.
• Advanced liquid cooling using Motivair by Schneider Electric CDU-based and hybrid air/liquid approaches capable of removing up to 84 per cent of heat.
• A digital-first infrastructure approach, which includes:
– Electrical and thermal design validated using ETAP and EcoStruxure IT Design CFD simulation tools that enable real-time monitoring and analytics, AI-driven predictive maintenance, and system-level optimisation across power, cooling and IT.
– Integrated Electrical Digital Twin capabilities to model, analyse and manage infrastructure performance.
– Support from AVEVA’s Unified Operations Centre for real-time monitoring and operational visibility.
• Power and cooling infrastructure deployments that adhere to AMD Helios platform requirements for reduced integration complexity and deployment risk.
• Better energy efficiency, with ability to achieve PUE as low as ~1.12 at full load.
The reference design has been validated to ANSI standards for U.S. deployments, with plans to extend the framework to support IEC standards for global implementations in the future.
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