The artificial intelligence (AI) arms race is reaching a fever pitch, bolstered by AMD signing a definitive agreement to acquire Silo AI, Europe’s biggest private AI lab, in an all-cash deal valued at around $665 million. That’s not chump change and we could see more big-dollar investments like this as companies look to add to their AI arsenal, or risk being left behind.
This particular acquisition is aimed at strengthening AMD’s end-to-end AI solutions and open-source AI software capabilities within the enterprise segment. In addition to being Europe’s largest private AI lab, Silo AI, which is based in Helsinki, Finland, has a presence in North America. It also brings with it some notable customers, such as Rolls-Royce, Nokia, and Philips.
“At Silo AI, our mission from the start has been to build an AI flagship company. Today’s announcement is a logical next step in that pursuit as we join forces with AMD to shape the future of AI computing,” said Peter Sarlin, CEO and co-founder of Silo AI. “We have a well-established history of building successful AI products and delivering value to our customers. We look forward to becoming part of AMD to further scale our impact and develop enterprise solutions and AI models that address the most complex challenges with deploying AI at scale today.”
The timely acquisition comes on the heels of AMD seeing a massive 80% year-over-year jump to $2.3 billion in its Data Center segment, driving in part by the ramp of its Instinct MI300 AI accelerators. In its last earnings report, AMD highlighted record data center GPU sales, with MI300 surpassing $1 billion in cumulative sales since launching in the fourth quarter of 2023.
AMD is also powering 900 public cloud instances with its EPYC processors, and recently unveiled its EPYC “Turin” chips based on Zen 5, which have begun sampling to customers.
Meanwhile, AI headwinds are pushing the technology industry as a whole. For example, Microsoft has teamed up with Qualcomm to power the first wave of Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X Elite and Plus hardware inside, and both AMD and Intel have released processors with dedicated NPU (neural processing units) to drive the next wave.
Then there’s NVIDIA, which continues to crush its earnings as its investments in AI hardware and software solutions pays off in a big way. The writing is on the wall, and it states that AI is where it’s at right now.
“Across every industry, enterprises are looking for fast and effective ways to develop and deploy AI solutions for their unique business needs,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of the Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD. “Silo AI’s team of trusted AI experts and proven experience developing leadership AI models and solutions, including state-of-the-art LLMs built on AMD platforms, will further accelerate our AI strategy and advance the build-out and rapid implementation of AI solutions for our global customers.”
Buying Silo AI is the latest move in a string of acquisitions that AMD has put together over the past year (such as acquiring Nod.Ai last October), having invested over $125 million across a dozen AI companies in the past 12 months.
