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AMD to acquire open-source AI software specialist

Jessie Shen, DIGITIMES Asia, Taipei 0

Credit: AFP

AMD has announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Nod.ai to expand the company's open AI software capabilities.

Nod.ai brings to AMD an experienced team that has developed industry-leading software technology that accelerates the deployment of AI solutions suited for AMD's Instinct data center accelerators, Ryzen AI CPUs, EPYC processors, Versal SoCs, and Radeon GPUs. The deal is highly aligned with AMD's AI growth strategy, according to the processor vendor.

"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, including SHARK, Torch-MLIR and OpenXLA/IREE code generation technology," said Anush Elangovan, co-founder and CEO of Nod.ai in AMD's statement. "By joining forces with AMD, we will bring this expertise to a broader range of customers on a global scale."

"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," said Vamsi Boppana, SVP of AMD's artificial intelligence group. "The addition of the talented Nod.ai team accelerates our ability to advance open-source compiler technology and enable portable, high-performance AI solutions across the AMD product portfolio. Nod.ai's technologies are already widely deployed in the cloud, at the edge and across a broad range of end point devices today."

During AMD's most recent earnings conference call, CEO Lisa Su stated that the company performed well in the quarter ending June 30, 2023, "launching multiple leadership products, significantly expanding our AI engagements, and ramping our latest Zen 4, EPYC, and Ryzen product families." AI customer engagements jumped by more than seven times sequentially in the last quarter.