AMD buys Taalas, the startup that hardwires AI models into silicon

AMD is acquiring Taalas, a Toronto startup founded in 2023 that fixes a single model's weights into a chip's metal layers rather than streaming them from memory — its first part runs Meta's Llama 3.1 8B at a claimed 17,000 tokens per second per user. Terms were undisclosed; Taalas had raised $219M since founding. Seven months after Nvidia paid $20B for Groq's assets, inference silicon is splitting into two tiers — flexible GPUs for new models, fixed-function chips for the few models running at scale — and AMD is folding Taalas into its Instinct and Helios rack roadmap.

Source: cnbc.com ↗