• July 10, 2024, chip giant AMD announced it will spend around $665 million to acquire Finnish artificial intelligence startup Silo AI.
  • AMD’s shares jumped more than 5.7% in early trading Wednesday, with gains then falling back to about 3% at $182.51.

OUR TAKE
“With any startup boom, there’s a pattern called the ‘chair grabbing game’. In the AI era, the number of chairs will be further reduced, and the challenge of becoming an AI enterprise giant will be much greater than in the mobile internet era.” Fang Han, chairman and CEO of Kunlun Wanwei, said. Currently, AMD is also targeting the AI boom, which has propelled NVIDIA to become the world’s most valuable chipmaker. AMD, on the other hand, is still a relatively new player in the field of AI development, and to continue to acquire more AI software expertise and intellectual property will inevitably mean ongoing operations and investment for AMD, which is why the company spent $665 million to acquire Silo AI, a Finnish AI startup.
–Elodie Qian, BTW reporter

What happened

On July 10, 2024, chip giant AMD announced that it will spend around $665 million to acquire Finnish artificial intelligence startup Silo AI to bolster its AI chip capabilities. According to Dealroom data, the size is the largest private AI startup acquisition in Europe since Google bought UK-based DeepMind in 2014 for around £400 million.

Spurred by the news, AMD’s shares jumped more than 5.7% in early trading Wednesday, with gains then falling back to about 3% at $182.51. In 2024, AMD’s stock is up about 20%, trailing the Philadelphia Stock Exchange’s Semiconductor Index’s 38% gain and Nvidia’s 165% gain. Even so, AMD’s market cap is still near the highest level in the company’s history.

Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, with operations across Europe and North America, Silo AI specialises in end-to-end AI-driven solutions that help customers quickly and easily integrate AI into their products, services and operations. They work across a diverse range of markets, with clients including Allianz, Philips, Rolls-Royce and Unilever. In addition to the SiloGen modelling platform, Silo AI also creates state-of-the-art open source multi-language LLMs such as Poro and Viking on the AMD platform.

The building and training of large-scale language models is a challenge even for tech giants, and AMD says the Silo AI acquisition will help it improve the development and deployment of AMD-powered AI models and help potential customers build complex AI models using AMD’s chips. Silo AI will also strengthen AMD’s software development capabilities.

The acquisition is expected to close in the second half of 2024. Peter Sarlin, CEO and co-founder of Silo AI, will continue to lead the Silo AI team as part of AMD’s Artificial Intelligence Group, reporting to Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AMD.

Also read: AMD launches new AI chips to challenge leader Nvidia

Also read: Microsoft unveils AMD alternative to Nvidia AI chips

Why it’s important

The acquisition is the latest in a series of expansionary moves by AMD in the artificial intelligence space. Last year, the company acquired AI software companies Mipsology and Nod.ai, and has invested more than $125 million in more than a dozen AI companies in the past 12 months.

“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.”

“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.”

After the acquisition complete, AMD expects to leverage Soli AI’s innovative strengths to drive its vision of superior AI computing and set new benchmarks for the industry.