Vultr, described as the world's largest privately held cloud infrastructure company, has placed a USD 1.2 billion order with Hewlett Packard Enterprise for AMD Helios AI Rack by HPE systems to be deployed at Vultr's cloud data center locations in the United States.

The announcement was made by HPE on September 30, 2026.

A Scale Deal Born From a Three-Year Partnership

For Vultr, the agreement extends a working relationship with Juniper Networks that stretches back nearly three years, a collaboration that continues now that Juniper Networks is part of HPE.

Vultr chief executive J.J. Kardwell said that history shaped how the order came together, noting that demand for high-performance AI infrastructure continues to outpace the capacity available to customers. "Together, we're delivering the memory capacity, interconnect performance, and energy efficiency customers need to run the largest and most demanding AI training and inference workloads," Kardwell said.

He added that Vultr's work with AMD and HPE enables the company to bring Helios rack-scale compute and scale-up networking online for its customers faster.

Inside the Rack: 72 GPUs, Venice CPUs and Vulcano NICs

The AMD Helios AI Rack by HPE sits within the HPE AI Data Center Solutions portfolio, a production-ready infrastructure stack designed by AMD around open standards and optimized for the economics and scale of the AI lifecycle.

AMD engineered Helios as a high-density platform intended for trillion-parameter model training and high-volume inference.

Each rack combines 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs with AMD EPYC "Venice" CPUs, AMD Pensando Vulcano AI NICs networking, and AMD ROCm software.

The unified design is optimized for power, cooling, and serviceability and supports open, interoperable rack-scale fabrics such as UALink over Ethernet (UALoE).

Networking hardware purpose-built for Helios by HPE includes six HPE Juniper Networking QFX5252 scale-up Ethernet switch trays per rack, connecting all 72 GPUs with high-bandwidth, low-latency, standards-based Ethernet.

HPE Services supports deployments with expertise in end-to-end delivery and liquid cooling for large AI clusters.

HPE Frames the Order as Proof of Its Integrated AI Strategy

HPE positions the Vultr agreement as a demonstration of its integrated approach, pairing HPE Juniper Networking technologies with HPE compute, exascale liquid cooling, and rack-scale engineering to deliver an open, Ethernet-based scale-up AI solution.

The deal draws on elements across HPE's portfolio, including networking hardware acquired through the Juniper deal, rack-scale systems engineering, and the company's global services organization.

Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE, said the order reflects the scale of infrastructure investment now underway across the industry.

"AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in history, and together with AMD and Vultr, we are building an open foundation to accelerate the next phase of AI," Neri said. "AMD Helios by HPE demonstrates HPE's unique ability to engineer the complete AI architecture with rack-scale compute, scale-up networking, and direct liquid cooling, all delivered by our global services."

HPE and AMD are supporting Vultr's effort to meet demand from service providers and enterprises for model training and inferencing workloads in AI data centers.

For Vultr, the deployment is framed as a way to expand capacity for the largest AI training and inference workloads its customers bring to its U.S. data centers, while also underscoring the role of AMD's data center AI stack, with the Helios rack as the delivery vehicle for MI455X GPUs and EPYC CPUs at scale.

Neither HPE nor Vultr disclosed a timeline for the deployments, nor the specific data center locations, beyond their being in the United States.