AMD acquires Taalas to hardwire AI models into silicon
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said today it has agreed to buy Taalas Inc., a Toronto startup that hardwires artificial intelligence models directly into silicon, in a deal that pushes the chipmaker deeper into the market for AI inference.
Terms were not disclosed. AMD shares rose about 1.5% following the announcement.
Founded in 2023, Taalas builds what it calls model-specific integrated circuits, chips that cast a model’s weights and dataflow into transistors instead of shuttling them in and out of high-bandwidth memory. Its first test chip, HC1, was built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.’s 6-nanometer process and served Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama 3.1 8B at close to 17,000 tokens per second, a rate Taalas said in February was 73 times that of Nvidia Corp.’s H200 at one-tenth the power. A second chip, HC2, targets models of about 20 billion parameters.
The tradeoff is flexibility. A finished Taalas part runs the model it was built for and nothing else, so a new model means new silicon. Taalas says that is cheaper than it sounds. Only two of the chip’s 100-plus layers change from one design to the next, and the company puts its tape-out time at roughly two months using in-house tools.
