AMD to acquire Taalas for specialised AI inference silicon

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has agreed to acquire Taalas, a Toronto-based developer of specialised AI inference silicon.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Financial terms were not included in the announcement.

AMD said the Taalas deal would build on its presence in Canada and its commitment to retaining and growing Canadian talent.

The company plans to integrate Taalas’ technology into its accelerator roadmap and develop system-level solutions using AMD Instinct GPUs.

AMD said the technology would complement its AI platform as inference workloads become more specialised and are used in more real-time and high-volume applications.

Taalas was founded in 2023. Its technology is designed to optimise inference data flows and reduce compute and memory bottlenecks associated with general-purpose architectures, according to AMD.

Taalas co-founder and CEO Ljubisa Bajic said: “We founded Taalas to rethink AI inference from the ground up by building the hardware around the model.

“Our Canada-based team has combined deep technical expertise with a willingness to challenge conventional approaches. Joining AMD will give us the scale, engineering resources and global reach to accelerate our innovation.”

The company will complement AMD’s portfolio of AI products, which includes Helios rack-scale systems, Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs and ROCm software.

AMD AI group senior vice president Vamsi Boppana said: “AMD is building a full-stack AI platform that gives customers the flexibility to deploy the right compute solutions for every AI workload.

“Taalas’ technology and world-class engineering team strengthen our AI portfolio by delivering differentiated inference performance and efficiency.”

The announcement follows AMD’s second-quarter results, reported earlier this week. AMD’s revenue for Q2 2026 was $11.5bn, while gross margin was 54%.

The company’s operating income was $2bn and net income was $2.3bn, while diluted earnings per share was $1.38.

On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin was 56%. Operating income was $3.1bn, net income was $2.8bn and diluted earnings per share was $1.66.

AMD has recently released the Helios rack-scale solution, the Instinct MI400 series, 6th Gen EPYC server CPUs, ROCm.ai and the Instinct MI350P GPU.

It also announced a partnership with Anthropic to deploy up to 2GW of MI450 Series GPUs in Helios racks, plus an expanded collaboration with Microsoft on Azure deployments.

Other announcements include a collaboration with Cerebras on ultra-low-latency inference serving and the acquisition of MEXT, which added predictive memory technology designed to optimise memory use and expand usable capacity for AI workloads.