AMD Goes All Out: Acquires Nine AI Companies in Three Years
AMD boosts AI dominance with 9 strategic acquisitions in 3 years, challenging Nvidia with next-gen Instinct GPUs & end-to-end solutions.
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Although AMD has invested heavily in accelerating the development of its Instinct data center GPUs to compete head-on with Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips, the company has also relied significantly on acquisitions to provide “end-to-end AI solutions.”
At the Advancing AI 2025 event scheduled for next Thursday, the Santa Clara, California-based chip design company is expected to share its “bold vision” for artificial intelligence and announce its next-generation Instinct GPUs, including the MI400, planned for release next year—efforts bolstered by several acquisitions the company has made over the past three years.
AMD CEO Lisa Su stated during last month’s earnings call: “(For the Instinct MI400) early customer feedback has been very positive, marking an important step forward in our Instinct roadmap and significantly expanding our AI accelerator (total addressable market), as customers plan broader Instinct deployments to support a larger share of AI infrastructure.”
AMD and Nvidia have been long-time rivals, but a few years ago, as Nvidia’s GPUs were used in generative AI development, its data center business began to grow significantly, intensifying the competition between the two companies.
Forrest Norrod, head of AMD’s data center solutions business unit, told CRN last year that he believes Nvidia decided to accelerate its GPU roadmap to an annual release cycle to address increasingly fierce competition, particularly from AMD.
AMD also announced last year that it would adopt the same strategy, with the Instinct MI325X set to launch later in 2024 and the MI350 soon entering production.
Norrod stated at the time: “We believe we are closing the gap, narrowing the distance between Nvidia’s release of their parts and our release of equivalent parts.”
To bolster its GPU, system, and software capabilities, AMD has made multiple acquisitions since 2023, starting with the acquisitions of software companies Mipsology and Nod.ai in 2023, followed last year by the acquisitions of AI lab Silo AI and data center infrastructure provider ZT Systems.
This acquisition spree has continued into this year, with the company announcing the acquisitions of silicon photonics startup Enosemi, compiler software startup Brium, and the team behind AI chip startup Untether AI within the past nine days.
These acquisitions have all contributed to improving and enhancing AMD’s artificial intelligence capabilities, particularly in the data center market, which offers the greatest potential for revenue growth and profitability.