For the first time, it looks like AMD is catching to Nvidia when it comes to AI GPUs. At its Advancing AI event, AMD launched the Instinct MI350X and MI355X, both of which are already shipping to customers. According to AMD, the 1400-watt MI355X can match and sometimes even exceed Nvidia's B200 — currently the most powerful data center GPU that Nvidia produces — depending on the data type. The MI350X and MI355X arrive less than a year after AMD launched the MI325X, and the company says it will continue to push out new Instinct GPUs for data center users each year.

AMD says the MI355X can beat Blackwell

A big chunk of performance comes from software

AMD says its new Instinct GPUs deliver somewhere between a 2.4x and nearly a 4x improvement over the MI325X, but the vast majority of that improvement doesn't come from hardware. It comes from software. Simply through optimizing ROCm — AMD's open-source software stack that's an answer to Nvidia CUDA — AMD says it's delivered a 3x performance improvement in AI training and 3.5x improvement in AI inference on the same hardware. The MI350X and MI355X are obviously benefiting greatly from those software advancements.

Make no mistake, though: these GPUs pack in the hardware. The MI350X and MI355X come with identical specs, but the MI355X runs at 1400W instead of 1000W like the MI350X. Both GPU models come with 288GB of HBM3 memory, and they're both built on a 3nm node with AMD's CDNA 4 architecture — a seperate architecture from RDNA 4 that's available on GPUs like the RX 9070 XT. That power difference just means that the MI350X is available in both air and liquid-cooled deployments, while the MI355X is only available with liquid cooling.

It doesn't sound like AMD is going to stop the momentum it has drummed up with its Instinct GPUs, either. It provided a preview of its next-gen MI400X that's set to launch next year, which AMD's Andrew Dieckmann says will be the top-performing AI GPU on the market. We'll see what Nvidia has to say about that, assuming it'll top the Blackwell B200 sometime next year. AMD says it'll offer MI400X racks with next-gen EPYC chips, codenamed Venice. Beyond that, AMD says its MI500X GPU is coming in 2027 alongside EPYC Verano.

Although AMD is already shipping the MI350X and MI355X to customers now, systems using the GPU will be available broadly from partners starting in the third quarter, including Dell, HP Enterprise, Supermicro, Gigabyte, and ASRock Rack. These racks obviously cost hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars, but they're still interesting to gawk at from afar. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to boot up my 16GB RX 9060 XT and salivate over terabytes of HBM memory sitting somewhere in a data center.