Advanced Micro Devices said Thursday it will acquire Taalas, a Toronto-based startup that designs specialized silicon for AI inference, for an undisclosed amount. The deal marks AMD's latest move to bolster its position in the rapidly growing market for chips that run trained AI models.
Taalas, founded in 2023, has raised roughly $219 million in venture funding, including a $169 million round in February. Its current chip runs a compact version of Meta's Llama 3.1 model, targeting bottlenecks in inference workloads.
The acquisition extends a broad buying spree by AMD, which expects GPUs to dominate the AI chip market. The company purchased ZT Systems for $4.9 billion, added MEXT and FastFlowLM to its AI portfolio earlier this year, and bought inference software startup MK1 last November. AMD has also recently begun shipping Helios, its first rack-scale system rivaling Nvidia's integrated server offerings, to customers including Meta and Microsoft.