AMD is buying Canadian AI startup Taalas, which builds specialized inference chips. Founded in Toronto in 2023, Taalas came out of stealth in February with an unusual approach: the company embeds a model's architecture and trained parameters directly into the chip. That makes inference extremely fast but locks each chip to a single model. A demo chip hit over 16,000 tokens per second per user running Llama 3.1-8B, many times faster than competing hardware. Google is reportedly working on a similar chip for Gemini.
The Taalas demo chip with Llama hard-coded into it blows past every other inference chip in raw speed, but it's locked to that one model. | Image: Taalas
AMD plans to fold the technology into its accelerator roadmap and offer it alongside Instinct GPUs as a system-level solution. Vamsi Boppana, SVP of AMD's AI division, said the deal strengthens the company's AI portfolio. Taalas co-founder Ljubisa Bajic said AMD provides the scale and reach the startup needs. The acquisition is subject to standard regulatory approvals.
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