AMD acquires Taalas to hardwire AI models into silicon

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has announced it will acquire Taalas Inc., a Toronto-based startup that creates chips specifically designed for artificial intelligence (AI) inference. The acquisition does not disclose the terms of the deal, but AMD shares increased by approximately 1.5% following the announcement. Taalas was founded in 2023 and builds model-specific integrated circuits (MSIC) that integrate a model's weights and dataflow directly into transistors, rather than using high-bandwidth memory.

Taalas' first chip, HC1, was built using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.'s 6-nanometer process and was able to process Meta Platforms Inc.'s Llama 3.1 8B model at nearly 17,000 tokens per second, which is 73 times faster than Nvidia Corp.'s H200 at one-tenth the power. The second chip, HC2, is designed for models with approximately 20 billion parameters.

However, this comes with a trade-off in flexibility, as a completed Taalas chip can only run the model it was designed for, meaning new silicon is required for each new model. Despite this, Taalas asserts that the cost is justified. The technology is slated for AMD's accelerator roadmap, with the aim of integrating the chips alongside AMD's Instinct GPUs in systems like Helios racks and Epyc processors, controlled through AMD's ROCm software.

Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AMD's Artificial Intelligence Group, emphasized that the deal provides customers with choice, enabling them to select the "right compute solutions for every AI workload." Taalas co-founder and CEO Ljubisa Bajic, who previously founded Tenstorrent Inc., stated that Taalas aims to "rethink AI inference from the ground up by building the hardware around the model."

The startup joins AMD's roster of AI acquisitions, which include MK1 in November and memory optimization startup Mext in June. Taalas raised $169 million in February from Quiet Capital, Fidelity, and semiconductor investor Pierre Lamond, bringing its total funding to approximately $219 million. The acquisition is subject to standard closing conditions and regulatory approvals.