AMD has agreed to acquire Taalas, a Toronto-based startup that hardwires AI models directly into custom silicon rather than relying on general-purpose GPUs. The deal follows Nvidia's $20 billion purchase of assets from startup Groq a little over seven months earlier, underscoring a broader push by chipmakers to diversify beyond flexible processors for specific, faster inference.
AMD said on Thursday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Taalas, a startup that builds chips customized, or hard-wired, for a single AI model rather than general-purpose processing. AMD did not disclose a purchase price for the transaction.
In exchange for that loss of flexibility, Taalas says its chips can produce output for specific models thousands of times faster than a traditional GPU, at lower cost. The startup has raised $219 million in venture funding since its 2023 founding.
Deal follows Nvidia's $20 billion Groq purchase
The acquisition comes a little over seven months after Nvidia spent $20 billion buying assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance AI chips, in what stands as Nvidia's largest transaction on record. Alternative chips from companies like Taalas and Groq matter most for low-latency applications, where the time to a model's first response is critical.
AMD CEO Lisa Su addressed that shift at a product launch in July, saying: "I'm a big believer that there's no one-size-fits-all as it comes to chips." She added that AMD still expects GPUs to make up the majority of the AI chip market because of their flexibility to support newly developed models.
AMD expands its Helios roadmap
Taalas' current chip runs a small version of Meta's Llama 3.1 model, though the company is developing chips for larger, more advanced models. It is manufactured on an older Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing process and uses fast SRAM memory built into the chip itself.
AMD plans to fold Taalas' chips and technology into its roadmap, including systems paired with its central processors and Instinct GPUs. The move follows AMD's July partnership with Cerebras to integrate its AI chips into AMD systems later this year. AMD has also been acquiring companies to build out its Helios rack-scale systems: it paid $665 million for Silo AI and $4.9 billion for ZT Systems in 2024, then bought several smaller AI companies, including inference software maker MK1, last year.
Source: CNBC
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