AMD preps Mega Pod with 256 Instinct MI500 AI GPUs, Verano CPUs — Leak suggests platform with better scalability than Nvidia will arrive in 2027
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By
Anton Shilov published September 4, 2025
It spans three linked racks.
SemiAnalysis this week shared some additional information about the product and revealed that it will pack 256 Instinct MI500-series GPUs. With early plans, however, it's possible details can change.
It spans three linked racks.
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The planned 'MI500 UAL256' architecture (the name is tentative, of course) spans three linked racks. Each of the two side racks is expected to include 32 compute trays packing one EPYC 'Verona' CPU and four Instinct MI500-series accelerators, while the central rack houses 18 trays dedicated to UALink switches. In total, the system comprises 64 compute trays serving 256 GPU modules.
Compared to Nvidia's Kyber VR300 NVL576 pod with 144 GPUs, AMD's MI500 UAL256 configuration offers around 78% more GPU packages per system. However, it remains to be seen whether AMD's MI500 MegaPod offers competitive performance compared to the mighty NVL576, which is set to feature 147 TB of HBM4 memory and 14,400 FP4 PFLOPS.
AMD's MI500 UAL256 will use liquid cooling both for compute and networking trays, which is not surprising given that AI GPUs that are becoming more power-hungry and creating more heat.
AMD's MI500 MegaPod is expected to become available in late 2027