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AMD will buy Finnish artificial intelligence start-up Silo AI for $665 million in one of the largest such acquisitions in Europe, as the US chipmaker looks to expand its AI services to compete with market leader Nvidia .
California-based AMD said Silo’s 300-member team would use its software tools to build custom large language models (LLM), the type of AI technology that underpins chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini . The cash acquisition is expected to close in the second half of this year, subject to regulatory approval.
“This deal helps us accelerate our customer engagements and deployments, while also helping us accelerate our AI technology group,” Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AMD’s artificial intelligence group, told the Financial Times.
The acquisition is the largest of a private AI start-up in Europe since Google bought UK-based DeepMind for about £400m in 2014, according to data from Dealroom.
The deal comes at a time when acquisitions by Silicon Valley companies have come under increased scrutiny from regulators in Brussels and the United Kingdom. Europe-based AI startups including Mistral, DeepL and Helsing have raised hundreds of millions of dollars this year as investors look for a local champion to rival US-based OpenAI and Anthropic.
Helsinki-based Silo AI, which is among the largest private AI labs in Europe, provides customized AI models and platforms for enterprise customers. The Finnish company launched an initiative last year to build LLMs in European languages, including Swedish, Icelandic and Danish.
AMD’s AI technology competes with that of Nvidia, which has taken the lion’s share of the high-performance chip market. Nvidia’s success has pushed its valuation to $3 trillion this year as tech companies scramble to build the computing infrastructure needed to power larger AI models. AMD began rolling out its MI300 chips late last year in a direct challenge to Nvidia’s “Hopper” line of chips.
Peter Sarlin, co-founder and chief executive of Silo AI, called the acquisition “the next logical step” as the Finnish group seeks to become a “flagship” AI company.
Silo AI is committed to “open source” AI models, which are freely available and can be customized by anyone. This distinguishes it from the likes of OpenAI and Google, which favor their own proprietary or “closed” models.
The start-up previously described its family of open models, called Poro, as an important step towards “strengthening European digital sovereignty” and democratizing access to LLM.
The concentration of the most powerful LLMs in the hands of a few US-based Big Tech companies is meanwhile drawing attention from antitrust regulators in Washington and Brussels.
The Silo deal shows that AMD is looking to quickly expand its business and drive customer engagement with its offering. AMD sees Silo, which builds custom models for customers, as a link between its “foundational” AI software and real-world applications of the technology.
Software has become a new battleground for semiconductor companies as they try to lock customers into their hardware and generate more predictable revenue outside the boom-and-bust chip sales cycle.
Nvidia’s success in the AI market stems from its multibillion-dollar investment in Cuda, its proprietary software that allows chips originally designed for processing computer graphics and video games to run a wider range of applications.
Since Cuda development began in 2006, Nvidia has expanded its software platform to include a variety of applications and services, primarily aimed at corporate customers who lack the resources and in-house capabilities that Big Tech companies need to build. in its technology.
Nvidia now offers more than 600 “pre-trained” models, meaning they are simpler for customers to deploy. The Santa Clara, California-based group last month began rolling out a “microservices” platform, called NIM, which promises to let developers quickly build chatbots and AI “co-pilot” services.
Historically, Nvidia has offered its software for free to buyers of its chips, but said this year it planned to charge for products such as NIM.
AMD is among several companies contributing to the development of an OpenAI-led rival to Cuda, called Triton, which would allow AI developers to more easily switch between chip providers. Meta, Microsoft and Intel also worked on Triton.