AMD’s latest acquisition will help reduce NVIDIA’s market advantage when it comes to AI hardware.
On Wednesday, semiconductor giant AMD announced it had acquired AI software optimization startup Brium. The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.
Blium is a startup that looks like a stealth mode. According to a blog post on Brium’s Bare-Bones website, the startup builds machine learning applications to enable AI inference, allowing AI inference.
A bit of that terminology is cut out, Brium will help renovate its AI software to use different AI hardware than originally designed.
In a press release, AMD said that acquisition of Brium will help its commitment to “building a high-performance, open AI software ecosystem that empowers developers and drives innovation.”
AMD says the acquisition will help create a more open AI ecosystem, which is not wrong, but it is also clear that AMD will help overcome one of its biggest obstacles.
Brium’s only blog post, released in November 2024, spoke about the industry’s dependence on Nvidia and called AMD specifically.
“In recent years, the hardware industry has been moving towards providing a viable alternative to NVIDIA hardware for server-side inference,” the blog post reads. “While solutions such as AMD’s instinct GPUs offer powerful performance characteristics, it remains a challenge to take advantage of what you actually have with performance in mind, as workloads are usually widely tuned with NVIDIA GPUs in mind. At Blium, we aim to enable efficient (model) inference within the scope of our hardware architecture.”
According to a press release, this is AMD’s fourth strategic acquisition in the last two years, with the company’s goal being to promote an open source AI ecosystem. The company previously acquired Silo AI (July 2024), Nod.ai (October 2023) and MIPSOLOGY (August 2023).
TechCrunch has contacted AMD for more information.