While AMD hasn't launched its upcoming Instinct MI400 series of accelerators yet, the company has started preparing its supply chain for what comes after. Thanks to SemiAnalysis, we have a clearer picture of what AMD's Instinct MI500 UAL256 rack will look like. At the base of each compute node, there will be a single "Verano" CPU paired with four Instinct MI500 accelerators. With up to 64 nodes, split across two 32-node racks, AMD plans to enable 256 logical GPUs and 64 CPUs per mega pod, working in tandem for advanced AI and HPC workloads. Instinct MI500s UAL256 will be AMD's second-generation rack-scale system, following the upcoming Instinct MI450X IF128 aka "Helios", scheduled for the second half of 2026. The Instinct MI500 UAL256 scale-up mega pod is scheduled to arrive in 2027, just in time for Verano and Instinct MI500 accelerator.

The Instinct MI500 UAL256 scale-up mega pod splits the compute into two 32-rack cabinets, with a single central rack connecting them and hosting 18 switching trays for networking. Each of these networking trays contains four 102.4T "Vulcano" switch ASICs, designed for 800G external throughput, and manufactured on TSMC's 3 nm node. For the central processor, AMD showed few details at its Advancing AI event, which claimed that Verano introduces the "Zen 7" microarchitecture for even higher IPC and support for even newer instruction sets. For now, it's not clear if AMD will increase CPU core counts beyond the up to 256 cores per package of "Venice." Still, we're hearing that Verano will retain the Socket SP7 infrastructure, which means it will likely retain the memory and PCIe interfaces introduced in 2026, such as PCIe Gen 6, UALink, and Ultra Ethernet.