In bid to loosen Nvidia’s grip on AI, AMD to buy Finnish startup for $665 million

Enlarge / A draw housing six Sapphire Technology Ltd. AMD graphics processing units. (credit: Akos Stiller/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

AMD is to buy Finnish artificial intelligence startup Silo AI for $665 million in one of the largest such takeovers in Europe as the US chipmaker seeks 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 (LLMs), the kind of AI technology that underpins chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. The all-cash acquisition is expected to close in the second half of this year, subject to regulatory approval.

“This agreement helps us both accelerate our customer engagements and deployments while also helping us accelerate our own AI tech stack,” Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AMD’s artificial intelligence group, told the Financial Times.