AMD has acquired AI chip startup Taalas, aiming to dramatically speed up AI inference by etching model weights directly into silicon rather than storing them in conventional memory. The move is part of AMD's ongoing effort to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, mirroring the logic behind Nvidia's own $20 billion licensing deal with Groq in December, and is intended to make premium, high-speed inference services for AI agents such as coding assistants faster and cheaper to run.

Founded in Toronto in 2023, Taalas builds what it calls model-specific integrated circuits (MSICs), which bake weights straight into the chip instead of relying on HBM memory. Its first test chip, the HC1, reportedly served Meta's Llama 3.1 8B model at nearly 17,000 tokens a second, far faster than Nvidia and Cerebras hardware, while a second-generation chip with 20 billion parameters is expected this summer. AMD is expected to combine this technology with its Instinct-based Helios racks, though it has not disclosed financial terms of the deal, confirmed as a full acquisition rather than an acquihire.