AMD acquires Taalas, a startup that bakes AI models directly into silicon

AMD is buying Canadian AI startup Taalas, which builds specialized inference chips. Founded in Toronto in 2023, Taalas came out of stealth in February with an unusual approach: the company embeds a model’s architecture and trained parameters directly into the chip. That makes inference extremely fast but locks each chip to a single model.

A demo chip hit over 16,000 tokens per second per user running Llama 3.1-8B, many times faster than competing hardware. Google is reportedly working on a similar chip for Gemini. AMD plans to fold the technology into its accelerator roadmap and offer it alongside Instinct GPUs as a system-level solution. Vamsi Boppana, SVP of AMD’s AI division, said the deal strengthens the company’s AI portfolio. Taalas co-founder Ljubisa Bajic said AMD provides the scale and reach the startup needs. The acquisition is subject to standard regulatory approvals. Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.