AMD Snags Taalas in Bid to Shake Nvidia's AI Chip Dominance

AMD has acquired Taalas, an AI inference chip startup based in Toronto, Canada. The acquisition was announced on August 6 and comes just over seven months after Nvidia acquired Groq-related assets for approximately $20 billion.

Taalas was founded in 2023 and takes a unique approach to AI chips by directly etching the weights of specific AI models onto silicon, creating model-specific integrated circuits. Its first test chip, HC1, released in February, achieved speeds of nearly 17,000 tokens per second when running the Llama 3.1 8B model.

The trade-off for this approach is reduced flexibility, as once a chip is taped out, the model is frozen on the silicon and any substantial update requires a new tape-out. However, Taalas claims it can implement hardware changes in just two months.