AMD's Strategic AI Acquisitions: Brium, Untether AI Team, and Enosemi Bolster Competitive Edge Against Nvidia

AMD takes aim at Nvidia's AI hardware dominance with Brium acquisition | TechCrunch

AMD's latest acquisition could help reduce Nvidia's market dominance when it comes to AI hardware. Semiconductor giant AMD on Wednesday announced it acquired AI software optimization startup Brium. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Brium is a startup that appears to be in stealth mode. The startup builds machine learning applications to enable AI inference, the process a trained AI model uses to draw conclusions from new data, across a variety of different hardware options, according to a blog post on Brium's bare-bones website. Cutting through that jargon a bit, Brium can help retrofit AI software to work with different AI hardware than it might have been designed for originally. In a press release, AMD said its acquisition of Brium will help its commitment to "building a high-performance, open AI software ecosystem that empowers developers and drives innovation." While AMD is saying that this acquisition helps create a more open AI ecosystem, which isn't wrong, it seems clear that it's also meant to help AMD overcome one of its biggest roadblocks: a large percentage of AI software is being designed for Nvidia hardware and chips. Brium's sole blog post, which came out in November 2024, talked about the industry's reliance on Nvidia and called out AMD specifically. "In recent years, the hardware industry has made strides towards providing viable alternatives to Nvidia hardware for server-side inference," the blog post reads. "Solutions such as AMD's Instinct GPUs offer strong performance characteristics, but it remains a challenge to harness that performance in practice as workloads are typically tuned extensively with Nvidia GPUs in mind. At Brium, we intend to enable efficient [model] inference across a range of hardware architectures." This is AMD's fourth strategic acquisition in the past two years toward the company's goal of fostering an open-source AI ecosystem, according to the press release. The company previously acquired Silo AI (in July 2024), Nod.AI (October 2023), and Mipsology (August 2023). TechCrunch has reached out to AMD for more information.

AMD acqui-hires the employees behind Untether AI | TechCrunch

Semiconductor giant AMD acqui-hired the team behind Untether AI, a startup that develops AI inference chips, as originally reported by CRN. Untether claims that their chips are faster and more energy-efficient than their rivals. The terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Toronto-based Untether was founded in 2018 and has raised more than $150 million in venture capital from firms including Intel Capital, Radical Ventures, and Tracker Capital Management, among others. Untether released an AI chip in October meant to power physical AI applications in machines including cars and agricultural devices. Earlier this week, AMD announced it had acquired AI software optimization platform Brium. TechCrunch has reached out to AMD for more information.

AMD Makes Another Software Acquisition To Bolster Their AI & Compiler Talent

"Brium brings advanced software capabilities that strengthen our ability to deliver highly optimized AI solutions across the entire stack. Their work in compiler technology, model execution frameworks, and end-to-end AI inference optimization will play a key role in enhancing the efficiency and flexibility of our AI platform. This acquisition strengthens our foundation for long-term innovation. It reflects our strategic commitment to AI, particularly to the developers who are building the future of intelligent applications. It is also the latest in a series of targeted investments, following the acquisitions of Silo AI, Nod.ai, and Mipsology, that together advance our ability to support the open-source software ecosystem and deliver optimized performance on AMD hardware."

AMD scoops entire Untether AI chip team -- Canada AI inference outfit will cease product support

AMD has announced that it has just acquired Toronto-based AI chip company Untether AI. This isn't the usual corporate acquisition, though, where the bigger firm completely buys the smaller one. Instead, AMD only hired the entire engineering team of Untether, leaving everything else behind. Because of this, its speedAI AI inference processor and imAIgine SDK will no longer be supplied and supported, according to Untether AI's announcement. "AMD has entered into a strategic agreement to acquire a talented team of AI hardware and software engineers from Untether AI," AMD said in a statement to CRN. "The transaction brings a world-class team of engineers to AMD, focusing on advancing the company's AI compiler and kernel development capabilities as well as enhancing our digital and SoC design, design verification, and product integration capabilities. We are excited to welcome the team's unique expertise to AMD." Untether AI specializes in building AI chips specifically designed for AI inference. While GPUs like Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra or AMD's Instinct MI350 excel at training AI models, speedAI performs better in inferencing and is far more energy efficient than these power-hungry GPUs. They achieve that by placing the processors right next to the memory, reducing latency and power consumption. It's unclear how many clients Untether AI has and how they will be affected by this change, especially as AMD did not purchase Untether AI's assets. This meant that companies that bought the latter's products were left holding the bag. At the same time, this massive hiring is a sign that AMD is expanding its capabilities to challenge Nvidia in other AI-related fields, not just the raw computing horsepower of AI GPUs. Just one day before this announcement, Team Red also announced its acquisition of Brium, a startup that focuses on AI inference optimization. These deals point to the company focusing on the next major step in AI development -- inferencing. Justin Kinsey, President of semiconductor recruiting firm SBT Industries, said in a LinkedIn post, "AMD's acquisition of Untether's engineering group is proof that the GPU vendors know model training is over, and that a decline in GPU revenue is around the corner." Although this is a bold prediction, Kinsey says that this has been an emerging pattern in the past six months. As the AI power bill keeps increasing every year, companies will likely soon look for alternatives that are far more efficient. The current AI GPUs that require hundreds of watts are highly suitable for training, but they consume too much power for AI inference. If AMD can deliver a specialized chip just for this application, it could potentially challenge Nvidia's dominance, especially as the AI industry continues to mature.

AMD bags the team behind AI chipmaker Untether AI, its third acquisition in two weeks - SiliconANGLE

AMD bags the team behind AI chipmaker Untether AI, its third acquisition in two weeks Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today announced its third acquisition in a span of just eight days. It has recruited an unknown number of employees from an Intel Corp.-backed company called Untether AI Inc., which sells energy-efficient artificial intelligence inference chips for data centers and edge deployments. News of the acquisition was first reported by CRN.com, which found out about the deal after spotting a post on LinkedIn by Justin Kinsey, the President of the semiconductor recruitment firm SBT Industries Inc. A spokesperson for AMD confirmed to CRN it has struck a deal to "acquire a talented team of AI hardware and software engineers" from the company. The new employees will help the chipmaker to advance its AI compiler and kernel development capabilities and enhance its system-on-chip design, verification and product integration processes, the company explained. The acquisition appears to have been done and dusted last month, and it doesn't include Untether Chief Executive Chris Walker, who formerly served at Intel until taking over the reins of the startup in early 2024. According to his LinkedIn profile, Walker stepped down from Untether AI last month. The deal is somewhat unusual because AMD didn't buy any of the company's assets, but it nevertheless means Untether AI is shutting down its business for good. One of the company's executives, Bob Beachler, told CRN that the deal "marks the end of Untether AI's journey" and that it will no longer sell or support its existing "speedAI" processors or its "imAIgine" software development kit. Toronto-based Untether AI was founded in 2018 and designed AI inference chips that featured an in-memory architecture to boost performance and reduce power consumption, making them suitable for low-energy edge applications such as sensors and drones. Its chips combined the memory and computing elements into the same package, rather than keeping them separate like traditional semiconductors do. The approach has the benefit of eliminating the need to keep shunting data back and forth between different components within the chip, significantly reducing its energy requirements. It also makes computations faster, because data can go from the memory to the compute elements and back again in less time. The startup got a lot of attention from bigger players in the chip industry, notably closing on a $125 million funding round led by Intel's venture arm Intel Capital in July 2021. Since then it has quietly continued to make progress, launching its latest processor, the speedAI240 Slim AI inference accelerator card in October. At the time, the company said the new chip showed three-times greater energy efficiency compared to rival chip hardware in the closed data center category. Besides its relationship with Intel, Untether AI also had partnerships with the likes of Ampere Computing LLC, Arm Holdings Ltd. and NeuReality Inc. Walker was interviewed by CRN as recently as April, and said that the company was seeing a lot of demand for its inference chips from clients looking for more efficient alternatives to Nvidia Corp.'s energy-hungry graphics processing units. The acquisition comes just two days after AMD announced it had bought a startup called Brium, which appears to have been operating in "stealth", if its bare-bones website is any indication. According to AMD's press release, Brium specializes in the development of machine learning applications that enable AI inference. It seems to be interested in using Brium's expertise to retrofit AI software so it can work with alternative hardware. This will help AMD to address the fact that the vast majority of AI developers optimize their software to run on Nvidia's GPUs. The acquisition of Brium came six days after AMD revealed plans to buy a startup called Enosemi Inc., which is a developer of silicon photonics chips that enable large clusters of AI accelerators to talk to each via fiber optic cables. That company will help AMD to boost its capabilities in network interconnects, as more customers look to combine thousands of processors together to power advanced AI workloads.

AMD's Acquisition Spree To Fight Nvidia Continues With Brium Buy

Anush Elangovan, corporate vice president of software development at AMD, says Brium's advanced software capabilities will 'strengthen our ability to deliver highly optimized AI solutions,' including its Instinct GPUs that have been key to its competitive fight with Nvidia. AMD is continuing its acquisition spree to challenge Nvidia's AI computing dominance with the purchase of a startup that specializes in AI software optimization. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip designer announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Brium, which is made up of "world-class compiler and AI software experts with deep expertise in machine learning, AI inference and performance optimization." [Related: Intel Spin-Off: Our InfiniBand Alternative For AI Data Centers Has A 'Devastatingly Good' Edge] Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Anush Elangovan, corporate vice president of software development at AMD, said Brium's advanced software capabilities will "strengthen our ability to deliver highly optimized AI solutions," including its Instinct GPUs that have been key to its fight with Nvidia. "Their work in compiler technology, model execution frameworks and end-to-end AI inference optimization will play a key role in enhancing the efficiency and flexibility of our AI platform," he wrote in a blog post. The major advantage AMD sees with Brium is the startup's "ability to optimize the entire inference stack before the model reaches the hardware," according to Elangovan. "This reduces dependence on specific hardware configurations and enables faster, more efficient out-of-the-box AI performance across a wide range of deployments," he said. Elangovan said the Brium team will "immediately contribute to key projects like OpenAI Triton, WAVE DSL and SHARK/IREE," which are "essential to enabling faster, more efficient execution of AI models on AMD Instinct GPUs." "By focusing on new precision formats like MX FP4 and FP6, we are equipping our AI platform to handle emerging workloads in training and inference more effectively, helping developers achieve higher performance while maintaining efficiency and cost-effectiveness," he wrote. The Brium acquisition will also help "accelerate the open-source tools" underlying AMD's AI software stack and advance its mission to support the specialized needs of customers in verticals ranging from health care and life sciences to finance and manufacturing. "Their successful porting of the Deep Graph Library (DGL) to [the] AMD Instinct platform is a clear example of how they enable cutting-edge AI applications in health sciences," Elangovan said. "This kind of domain-specific expertise enhances our ability to deliver optimized solutions for high-value industries, broadening our market reach and strengthening our position as a trusted partner across a diverse range of sectors." While AMD's announcement and Brium's website didn't contain any details about the startup's founding team, the LinkedIn profile for Brium co-founder and CTO Quentin Colombet said he has nearly a decade of experience of developing compilers and compiler optimizations for GPUs and accelerator chips at Google, Meta and Apple. Much of this work has been focused on machine learning. Brium is the latest in a string of acquisitions AMD has made over the last couple years to boost its competitive stance against Nvidia, whose command of the AI market allowed the rival to earn more than double the revenue of AMD and Intel combined last year. The most recent acquisitions include silicon photonics startup Enosemi and data center infrastructure provider ZT Systems, both of which closed this year. Prior to that, AMD acquired three software firms -- Silo AI, Nod.ai and Mipsology -- to improve its software stack. "This is more than just a software play, it's about delivering real value to customers, driving adoption of AMD platforms and helping define the next era of AI computing," said Elangovan, who was founder and CEO of Nod.ai prior to joining AMD.

Exclusive: AMD Acquires Team Behind AI Chip Startup Untether AI

The chip designer confirms to CRN that it has acquired the employees of Untether AI, a developer of AI inference chips marketed as faster and more energy-efficient than rival products for edge environments and data centers. AMD confirmed Thursday that it has acquired the employees behind Untether AI, a developer of AI inference chips marketed as faster and more energy-efficient than rival products for edge environments and enterprise data centers. "AMD has entered into a strategic agreement to acquire a talented team of AI hardware and software engineers from Untether AI," an AMD spokesperson told CRN in a statement. "The transaction brings a world-class team of engineers to AMD, focused on advancing the company's AI compiler and kernel development capabilities as well as enhancing our digital and SoC design, design verification, and product integration capabilities. We are excited to welcome the team's unique expertise to AMD," the representative added. The AMD spokesperson declined to disclose financial details of the deal. A statement sent by Untether AI executive Bob Beachler said the startup "will no longer be supplying or supporting our speedAI products and imAIgine software development kit" as part of the transaction. "While today marks the end of Untether AI's journey, we are proud of the pioneering research that underpinned our work in advancing state of the art AI chip technology," the statement read. "We are grateful for the dedication of our team and the support of our customers, partners, and investors. We look forward to the contributions our world-class team will make with AMD." This is the latest of several acquisitions AMD has made over the past few years to expand its AI computing capabilities and challenge Nvidia's dominance in the field. Just a day before, the company announced that it had acquired compiler startup Brium to optimize AI performance on the chip designer's Instinct data center GPUs, among other things. The Untether AI news was first shared on LinkedIn by Justin Kinsey, president of SBT, a Phoenix, Ariz.-based recruitment firm focused on the semiconductor industry. Chris Walker, a former Intel executive who became Untether AI's CEO early last year, left the startup in May, according to his LinkedIn profile. Walker did not respond to a request for comment. Founded in 2018, the Toronto, Ontario-based startup had been selling AI inference chips for edge environments and data centers based on its "at-memory" architecture that it said "dramatically" improved performance and reduced power consumption. "We've proven that when you reduce data traffic in the chip, you're improving both throughput and energy efficiency, and so the difference between what you need to do [at the edge or in a data center], it's really more about how many rows and columns do we put down in the memory interface," Walker told CRN in an April interview. Last October, the company launched its speedAI240 Slim AI inference accelerator card, which it said demonstrated three times greater energy efficiency than other chips in the closed data center category and six times greater energy efficiency in the closed edge category for peer-reviewed MLPerf test results released months earlier. The speedAI 240 also exhibited the fastest performance of any single PCIe card in the data center and edge categories for the ResNet-50 image classification benchmark, it said. Untether AI said the speedAI240 card, which was available in a 75-watt PCIe design, had already been adopted by U.S.-based rugged embedded computing provider J-Squared Technologies and India-based AI cloud computing firm Ola-Krutrim. Months before, the chip designer announced a "multi-faceted partnership" with Ola-Krutrim that included the "co-development of Untether AI's next-generation data center solutions." The company had partnerships with several other companies, including semiconductor companies like Ampere Computing, Arm and NeuReality, plus solution providers such as Boston, Asa Computers and Vertical Data. In his April interview with CRN, Walker said "there's a strong appetite" for Untether AI's chips, particularly because of the need for processors that don't consume as much energy as Nvidia's energy-hungry GPUs that are pushing racks to 120 kilowatts. "I think we haven't even scratched the surface yet of AI really being deployed in either industrial edge or enterprise applications where [there are] tens of thousands of small data centers that are power constrained," he said.

9 AMD Acquisitions Fueling Its AI Rivalry With Nvidia

While AMD has made significant investments to speed up development of its Instinct data center GPUs to go head-to-head with Nvidia's most powerful AI chips, the company has also leaned heavily into acquisitions so that it can offer "end-to-end AI solutions." At its Advancing AI 2025 event next Thursday, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip designer is expected to share its "bold vision" for AI and announce its next generation of Instinct GPUs, including the MI400 slated for release next year, among other things -- efforts of which have been boosted by several acquisitions the company has made over the past three years. [Related: Analysis: Nvidia Vs. Intel Vs. AMD Q1 Earnings Face-Off] "Early customer feedback [for the Instinct MI400] has been very positive, marking a major step forward in our Instinct roadmap and significantly expanding our AI accelerator [total addressable market] as customers plan broader Instinct deployments to power a larger share of their AI infrastructure," AMD CEO Lisa Su said on her earnings call last month. AMD and Nvidia have been long-time rivals, but competition between the two companies kicked into overdrive when the latter a few years ago began to see its data center business grow by major leaps thanks to its GPUs being adopted for generative AI development. Forrest Norrod, the head of AMD's data center solutions business unit, told CRN last year that he believes Nvidia decided to accelerate its GPU road map to an annual release cadence in response to increasing competition, particularly from AMD. AMD, in turn, announced last year that it would do the same, with the Instinct MI325X launching later in 2024 and the MI350 on track to begin production soon. "We think we are closing the gap, narrowing the gap between the introduction of Nvidia's part and the introduction of our same generation part," Norrod said at the time. To flesh out its GPU, system and software capabilities, AMD has made several acquisitions since 2023, starting with software firms Mipsology and Nod.ai in 2023 and then continuing with AI lab Silo AI and data center infrastructure provider ZT Systems last year. That acquisition spree has continued into this year, with the company announcing that it scooped up silicon photonics startup Enosemi, compiler software startup Brium and the team behind AI chip startup Untether AI in the last nine days. These acquisitions have all served to improve and build out AMD's AI capabilities, particularly when it comes to the data center market, where the greatest potential for revenue growth and profitability lies. But the company's AI strategy and its ability to compete with Nvidia has also benefited from acquisitions prior to its latest shopping spree. This includes the company's 2022 acquisitions of programmable chip designer Xilinx and networking chip designer Pensando, which have both served to expand AMD's opportunities with new products and markets. What follows is a roundup of nine acquisitions AMD has made over the past three years to fuel its AI strategy, including two that were announced this week.

AMD Hires Team Behind Instinct-Boosting AI ISV Lamini

While an AMD spokesperson says the move was strictly a hiring and not an acquisition, it continued the chip designer's AI talent grab that has been boosted by several acquisitions it has made over the past three years to boost its rivalry with Nvidia. AMD continued its AI talent grab Wednesday with the announcement that it has hired the team behind an early ISV supporter of its Instinct GPUs. Sharon Zhou, co-founder and CEO of generative AI startup Lamini, said on X that she and several employees are joining the chip designer. [Related: Analysis: Nvidia Vs. Intel Vs. AMD Q1 Earnings Face-Off] An AMD spokesperson told CRN that the move was strictly a hiring and did not represent an acquisition of the team in the same way that it did with AI chip startup Untether AI, which the company confirmed last week. With her new title of vice president of AI, Zhou said she will pursue AI research and teaching while working closely with Vamsi Boppana, vice president of AMD's AI group, as well as company executives Ramine Roane and Anush Elangovan. Prior to starting Lamini in 2022, Zhou held several roles, including as an adjunct computer science faculty at Stanford University, where she got her Ph.D. in computer science while she was advised by Google Deep Brain founder Andrew Ng. She also worked as a machine learning product manager at Google and as a product manager at AI startups Kensho Technologies and Tamr. The move was announced a day before AMD is expected to ramp up its competition against Nvidia with the reveal of next-generation Instinct GPUs, including the MI400 slated for release next year, among other things. These efforts have been boosted by several acquisitions AMD has made over the past three years, including three from the past month. While most of the acquisitions have been made to boost AMD's AI software and hardware offerings, they have also helped the company expand the AI expertise of its workforce. Zhou and AMD did not say how this move would affect Lamini, which the chip designer first highlighted in 2023 as an early ISV supporter of its Instinct GPUs. Founded by Zhou and former Nvidia CUDA software architect Greg Diamos, Lamini's platform allowed enterprises to fine-tune and customize LLMs into private models using proprietary data. Diamos, who was previously an AMD fellow who worked on enabling LLM systems to run on Instinct GPUs, left Lamini in 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile. Lamini announced in September of 2023 that it had been "secretly running on more than 100" Instinct MI200 series GPUs and found that AMD's ROCm software platform had "achieved software parity" with Nvidia's CUDA platform. The startup went on to raise a $25 million funding round last year from several investors, including the venture arm of AMD, Andrew Ng, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Lip-Bu Tan, who became Intel's CEO earlier this year.