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AMD is to buy Finnish artificial intelligence startup Silo AI for $665 million, one of its biggest acquisitions in Europe, as the US chipmaker aims to expand its AI services to take on market leader Nvidia.
California-based AMD said Silo's 300-member team will use its software tools to build custom large-scale language models (LLMs), the AI technology that underpins chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. The all-cash acquisition is expected to close later this year, subject to regulatory approvals.
“This deal will accelerate our customer engagement and deployments, while also helping us accelerate our own AI technology stack,” Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of AMD's artificial intelligence group, told the Financial Times.
The acquisition would be the largest by a privately held European AI startup since Google bought UK-based DeepMind for around £400 million in 2014, according to Dealroom data.
The deal comes at a time when acquisitions by Silicon Valley companies are facing increased scrutiny from regulators in Brussels and the U.K. Europe-based AI startups including Mistral, DeepL and Helsing have raised hundreds of millions of dollars this year as investors seek local champions to rival U.S. companies OpenAI and Anthropik.
Helsinki-based Silo AI is one of the largest private AI labs in Europe, providing customized AI models and platforms for enterprise clients. The Finnish company last year began work on building LLMs in European languages, including Swedish, Icelandic and Danish.
AMD's AI technology competes with that of Nvidia, which dominates a large portion of the high-performance chip market. Nvidia's success has helped drive the company's valuation to more than $3 trillion this year as tech companies focus on building the computing infrastructure needed to run the largest AI models. Late last year, AMD began rolling out its MI300 chip, which is a direct challenger to Nvidia's “Hopper” chip line.
Silo AI co-founder and CEO Peter Sahlin said the acquisition was a “logical next step” for the Finnish group as it aims to become a “flagship” AI company.
Silo AI works on “open source” AI models that are freely available and can be customized by anyone — a departure from companies like OpenAI and Google, which favor proprietary or “closed” models.
The startup previously described its set of open models, called “Poro”, as an important step towards “strengthening European digital sovereignty” and democratising access to LLMs.
Meanwhile, the concentration of the most influential law master's programs in the hands of a few large U.S.-based technology companies has attracted the attention of antitrust regulators in Washington and Brussels.
The Silo deal signals AMD's efforts to rapidly scale its business and increase customer engagement with its products and services. AMD sees Silo, which builds custom models for customers, as a bridge between its “foundational” AI software and real-world applications of the technology.
Software has become the new battleground for semiconductor companies as they try to keep customers hooked to their hardware and generate more predictable revenue outside the boom-and-bust chip sales cycle.
Nvidia's success in the AI market is due to billions of dollars of investment in Cuda, its proprietary software that enables chips originally designed to process computer graphics and video games to run a wider range of applications.
Since starting development of NVIDIA's Cuda in 2006, Nvidia has expanded its software platform to add a range of apps and services, primarily aimed at enterprise customers that don't have the in-house resources or skills needed for big tech companies to build on top of its technology.
Nvidia now offers more than 600 “pre-trained” models, making it easier for customers to deploy, and last month the Santa Clara, California-based group began rolling out a “microservices” platform called NIM that lets developers quickly build chatbots and AI “co-pilot” services.
Until now, Nvidia has offered its software for free to buyers of its chips, but this year it announced plans to charge for products such as NIM.
AMD is one of several companies involved in the development of Triton, an OpenAI-led Cuda rival that aims to make it easier for AI developers to switch chip providers. Meta, Microsoft and Intel are also working on Triton.
