They’re direct shots at NVIDIA’s AI systems
AMD’s big pitch for 2026 seems to be: “Who needs cloud AI processing when you can do it all locally?” At CES this year, the company unveiled its Ryzen AI Halo PC, a Mac Mini-sized system that can crank out AI work. Today, AMD announced that it will start at $3,999 with Ryzen AI Max 300 CPUs, and we can also look forward to a future model with new Ryzen AI Max 400 chips, as well. Preorders start in June.
While pricey, AMD positions the Halo as a cost-effective alternative to paying high monthly AI computing fees. If you’re spending $773 a month to use 6 million daily AI tokens — which isn’t an unusual scenario for many developers — the Halo could pay itself off within six months. And for more demanding work, AMD says its $4,000 Radeon R9700 Pro GPU could break even within three months for people paying $2,253 a month to use 18 million daily tokens.Â
If it’s not clear already, these aren’t devices meant for regular consumers. Instead, AMD is directly competing with NVIDIA’s DGX Spark AI PC, which now goes for $4,699 after launching at $4,000. While NVIDIA’s AI PC can only run Linux, the Ryzen AI Halo can run either Windows or Linux, since it’s powered by an x64 chip. Another advantage? The Halo has a 50 TOPS NPU and a Radeon GPU with 40 compute units, whereas the DGX Spark leans entirely on NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPU for AI work. Both systems also have 128GB of unified system memory, which is essential for running large models. Notably, that’s also more memory than you can have in a Mac Mini or Mac Studio, which are both popular with AI developers.
As for those new Ryzen AI Max 400 chips, they’ll be led by the AI Max+ Pro 495, a 16-core chip with a 5.2GHz boost speed, 55 TOPS NPU and Radeon 8065S graphics. Those chips will also support up to 192GB of unified memory, allowing for 160GB of GPU VRAM. Spec-wise, it’s only slightly faster than the AI Max 395, which has a 5GHz CPU boost clock speed, but we’ve yet to see comparison benchmarks from AMD. The company says Ryzen AI Max 400 chips will be available in the third quarter of 2026.
