AMD's expertise in the supercomputers sector seems to pay off as the company secured a $1 billion partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) to build two next-generation supercomputers aimed at scientific and national security challenges, from nuclear fusion research to cancer treatments. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the initiative will "supercharge" progress in nuclear energy, defense technologies and drug discovery, accelerating breakthroughs that traditionally take decades. The first system, Lux, is set to go online within six months. Co-developed by AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Lux will be powered by AMD's Instinct MI355X AI accelerators alongside AMD CPUs and networking chips. ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer noted that Lux will deliver roughly three times the AI performance of today's top supercomputers , while AMD CEO Lisa Su called it "the fastest deployment of this scale we've ever seen." A second system, dubbed Discovery, will follow later in the decade. Built on AMD's upcoming MI430 AI chips, the more advanced machine is expected to be completed by 2028 and operational by 2029. Both systems are part of a broader U.S. effort to maintain leadership in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.

According to Reuters, the DoE's choice of AMD reflects confidence in the company's proven HPC track record, particularly with Frontier and El Capitan , the world's fastest supercomputers, which also runs on AMD hardware. Wright added that these new systems will help simulate complex processes like plasma dynamics for fusion energy and molecular interactions for drug development. "We're going to see massively faster progress toward harnessing fusion and treating diseases that are still death sentences today," he said. Together, Lux and Discovery mark a milestone for both AMD and U.S. scientific computing and build momentum for AMD's upcoming MI400 accelerators series.