AMD has made its second AI software startup acquisition in less than two months, and it’s all about enhancing the chip designer’s open software capabilities to better compete with Nvidia.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said Tuesday that it has acquired Nod.ai, which develops compiler-based automation software to optimize AI solutions for hyperscalers, enterprises and startups.
[Related: LLM Startup Embraces AMD GPUs, Says ROCm Has ‘Parity’ With Nvidia’s CUDA Platform]
The acquisition was disclosed less than two months after AMD revealed that it had acquired French startup Mipsology to strengthen its AI inference capabilities.
The rapid-fire software investments are part of AMD CEO Lisa Su’s plan to mount its largest challenge yet to Nvidia’s AI computing prowess, a plan that includes the upcoming launch of its Instinct MI300 chips this quarter and the development of a unified AI software stack.ADVERTISEMENT
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“The acquisition of Nod.ai is expected to significantly enhance our ability to provide AI customers with open software that allows them to easily deploy highly performant AI models tuned for AMD hardware,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AMD’s AI group, in a statement.
Nod.ai’s software “accelerates the deployment of AI solutions optimized” for AMD’s portfolio of chips, including the Instinct accelerators, EPYC processors and Versal system-on-chips for data centers and edge computing as well as the Ryzen AI processors and Radeon GPUs for PCs, according to AMD.
This reduces the need to manually optimize and the time it takes to deploy “highly performant AI models” on AMD’s processors, the chip designer said.
“The addition of the talented Nod.ai team accelerates our ability to advance open-source compiler technology and enable portable, high-performance AI solutions across the AMD product portfolio. Nod.ai’s technologies are already widely deployed in the cloud, at the edge and across a broad range of end point devices today,” Boppana said.
Nod.ai was founded in 2013 by Anush Elangovan, who worked on the first Arm-based Chromebook as an engineer at Google and previously served as a principal engineer at Agnilux, a startup acquired by Google that became the basis for its ChomeOS operating system.
Elangovan said Nod.ai has been the “primary maintainer and a major contributor to some of the world’s most important AI repositories” on Github. These include SHARK, a high-performance machine learning distribution; TorchMLIR, which aims to improve compilation and lower compilation costs for a variety of chips; and OpenXLA/IREE, an MLIR-based machine learning compiler and runtime toolkit.
“By joining forces with AMD, we will bring this expertise to a broader range of customers on a global scale,” Elangovan said in a statement.LEARN MORE: CPUs-GPUs | AI
Dylan Martin is a senior editor at CRN covering the semiconductor, PC, mobile device, and IoT beats. He has distinguished his coverage of the semiconductor industry thanks to insightful interviews with CEOs and top executives; scoops and exclusives about product, strategy and personnel changes; and analyses that dig into the why behind the news. He can be reached at [email protected].
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