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The chipmaker shared plans to ramp up production of its AI accelerator chips earlier this year, after it reported a massive plunge in net profit.
AMD has signed a definitive agreement to acquire open-source start-up Nod.ai, as the semiconductor giant moves to expand its AI software capabilities.
The company said this deal will give it access to the experienced team of Nod.ai, which will be used to accelerate AMD’s plans to create AI chips. Nod.ai says it provides key open-source technologies for future AI systems, by using advanced compiler based approaches instead of legacy handwritten kernels.
“We are a team of engineers focused on problem-solving – quickly – and moving at pace in an industry of constant change to develop solutions for the next set of problems,” said Nod.ai co-founder and CEO Anush Elangovan. “Our journey as a company has cemented our role as the primary maintainer and major contributor to some of the world’s most important AI repositories.
“By joining forces with AMD, we will bring this expertise to a broader range of customers on a global scale.”
In August, AMD revealed plans to ramp up the production of its AI accelerator chips, including new chips designed specifically for the Chinese market, in order to comply with US export rules.
This announcement came after the company reported a quarterly drop in net income of 94pc, mirroring the issues other semiconductor companies have been facing this year.
AMD said the Nod.ai team will accelerate AI upgrades for AMD’s Instinct data centre accelerators, Ryzen AI processors, EPYC processors, Versal system-on-chips and Radeon GPUs. Vamsi Boppana, senior VP of AMD’s artificial intelligence group, said Nod.ai’s technologies are already widely deployed in the cloud, at the edge and “across a broad range of endpoint devices”.
“The acquisition of Nod.ai is expected to significantly enhance our ability to provide AI customers with open software that allows them to easily deploy highly performant AI models tuned for AMD hardware,” Boppana said.
The decision will push AMD further into a market that is largely dominated by Nvidia, which reported a sales increase of 101pc for its second fiscal quarter of 2023. This increased revenue was largely attributed to its data centre business, which is responsible for the Nvidia A100 and H100 chips used by generative AI systems.
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