Global energy technology company Schneider Electric and computing solutions company AMD has announced a jointly developed and validated reference design for the AMD Helios rackscale solution that is said to provide a scalable blueprint for deploying high-density AI environments faster and with reduced risk and complexity.

The 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 central processing units, AMD Pensando Vulcano network interface cards and the open ROCm software ecosystem.

AMD says its Helios solution 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.

The company explains that, as AI workloads push data centre infrastructure to greater 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, 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.

“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,” said Schneider Electric executive VP: secure power and data centres Manish Kumar.

“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 AMD executive VP and GM: data centre solutions business group Forrest Norrod. “AMD Helios provides an open, rackscale 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.”

The new collaboration aims to create a more tightly integrated approach to deploying both greenfield AI factories and high-density retrofit environments. 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.