Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today announced that it has invested $20 million in Absci Corp., a company using artificial intelligence to develop new medicines.

AMD will also partner with the company to support its research efforts. 

Absci launched in 2011 to develop proteins with therapeutic applications. In 2018, the company debuted a system called SoluPro that uses bacteria cells to manufacture such proteins. Absci floated on the Nasdaq three years later via an initial public offering that raised about $200 million.

A few months before its stock market debut, Absci acquired an AI startup called Denovium. The latter company developed a neural network that can automate some of the repetitive research work involved in studying proteins. It trained the model on a dataset of more than 100 million proteins.

Today, Absci operates a 77,000-square-foot lab where it generates training data for a collection of clinical AI models. Those models are designed to help medical researchers more quickly identify epitopes. An epitope is a part of a disease-causing molecule that can potentially be targeted as part of the treatment process.

After identifying an epitope, researchers search for a protein that can attach to it and treat the disease. Such proteins form the basis of new drugs. According to Absci, its AI can generate millions of protein designs and automatically filter them based on factors such as whether it’s practical to turn them into medicines.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the company currently uses more than 470 AI chips to support its research. Most of chips are Nvidia Corp. graphics cards. As part of the partnership announced today, Absci will shift some workloads to AMD’s Instinct line of AI processors.

The newest chip in the series, the Instinct MI325X, debuted last June. It promises to provide 30% higher inference performance than the H100 graphics card that Nvidia released in 2022. This year, AMD plans to launch a more capable chip called the MI355X that will provide 80% higher performance than the MI325X.

Absci will also use the chipmaker’s ROCm software, which helps developers run AI models on its processors. The software eases tasks such as distributing a language model across multiple chips to speed up calculations. It also includes a collection of prepackaged scientific applications spanning fields such as chemistry and physics.

“AMD high-performance compute will enable us to further the development of next-generation antibody therapeutics,” said Absci founder and Chief Executive Officer Sean McClain.

Absci will use AMD’s $20 million investment to enhance its AI models. In parallel, the companies will collaborate to develop new hardware and software optimized for the healthcare sector. The effort will place particular emphasis on developing technologies that can advance drug discovery. 

Image: AMD