Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said today it has agreed to buy Taalas Inc., a Toronto startup that hardwires artificial intelligence models directly into silicon, in a deal that pushes the chipmaker deeper into the market for AI inference.

Terms were not disclosed. AMD shares rose about 1.5% following the announcement.

Founded in 2023, Taalas builds what it calls model-specific integrated circuits, chips that cast a model’s weights and dataflow into transistors instead of shuttling them in and out of high-bandwidth memory. Its first test chip, HC1, was built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.’s 6-nanometer process and served Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama 3.1 8B at close to 17,000 tokens per second, a rate Taalas said in February was 73 times that of Nvidia Corp.’s H200 at one-tenth the power. A second chip, HC2, targets models of about 20 billion parameters.

The tradeoff is flexibility. A finished Taalas part runs the model it was built for and nothing else, so a new model means new silicon. Taalas says that is cheaper than it sounds. Only two of the chip’s 100-plus layers change from one design to the next, and the company puts its tape-out time at roughly two months using in-house tools.

The technology is headed for AMD’s accelerator roadmap. The larger plan is systems, not just parts. AMD wants Taalas chips working next to its Instinct GPUs, wired into the Helios racks and Epyc processors it sells and programmed through its ROCm software.

Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AMD’s Artificial Intelligence Group, said the aim is choice, giving customers “the right compute solutions for every AI workload.” Taalas brings what he called differentiated inference performance and efficiency.

Taalas co-founder and Chief Executive Ljubisa Bajic is on his second AI chip company. He ran Tenstorrent Inc. before leaving to start Taalas. The startup was founded “to rethink AI inference from the ground up by building the hardware around the model,” he said. His Toronto team joins Boppana’s group when the deal closes.

The purchase lands in a market that has reorganized itself around inference over the past year. Nvidia agreed in December to license inference technology from Groq Inc. in a reported $20 billion deal, then put it to work in the Groq 3 language processing unit unveiled at its GTC conference in March. Taalas is AMD’s third AI acquisition in nine months, following MK1 in November and memory optimization startup Mext in June. The FastFlowLM team joined the company in July.

Taalas raised $169 million in February from Quiet Capital, Fidelity and semiconductor investor Pierre Lamond, taking its total to about $219 million.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

Image: Taalas