Schneider Electric and AMD 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 optimizing power and efficiency.
As AI workloads push data center infrastructure to unprecedented limits, reference designs provide data center architects and operators with tested, scalable designs proven to handle new power densities, thermal requirements and operational complexity. By modeling data center physical infrastructure performance, these pre-validated blueprints help shorten the planning process by defining how power, cooling, and IT infrastructure should be organized to build a reliable, scalable, and AI-ready data center. The AMD Helios reference design includes information on four technical areas: facility power, facility cooling, IT space, and lifecycle software.
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% 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 optimization across power, cooling, and IT
Integrated Electrical Digital Twin capabilities to model, analyze, and manage infrastructure performance
Support from AVEVA’s Unified Operations Center 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.
Manish Kumar, Executive Vice President, Secure Power & Data Centers at Schneider Electric
Today organizations require comprehensive, AI-ready reference designs that can take them from planning to deployment faster and with less risk. 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 center implementation, enabling customers to deploy scalable, high-density AI environments with greater confidence, efficiency, and speed.
Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions Business Group, AMD
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. 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.
