AMD to buy Finnish startup Silo AI for $665M in drive to compete with Nvidia
AMD acquires Finnish start-up Silo AI for $665 million to boost AI services, compete with Nvidia. Silo AI's 300-member team will enhance AMD's AI tech stack with custom large language models.
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AMD has announced the acquisition of Finnish start-up Silo AI for $665 million, marking one of the largest takeovers in Europe. The move is part of AMD's strategy to expand its artificial intelligence services and compete with Nvidia. Silo AI's team of 300 members will leverage their software tools to develop custom large language models (LLMs), crucial for AI technologies like chatbots. The acquisition, expected to close in the second half of the year, aims to accelerate customer engagements and enhance AMD's AI tech stack. Silo AI, known for its tailored AI models and platforms, has been working on building LLMs in European languages. This deal reflects AMD's effort to scale its business rapidly and strengthen its AI offerings. The acquisition aligns with the trend of semiconductor companies focusing on software to complement their hardware offerings and generate more stable revenues. Nvidia, AMD's competitor, has been successful in the AI market with its proprietary software platform, Cuda, and a range of pre-trained models. The acquisition of Silo AI positions AMD to better compete in the AI landscape and drive innovation in the field.
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34 commentsI don’t know what AMD has in mind for this acquisition but I could see there being a lot of value having an in house LLM team to create models for customers to build on, run in benchmarks, and improve their products.
It's gonna be quite interesting to see if this works out strategically.
I guess the bet is an in-house army of PhDs vs. having a CUDA - which you don't as a second mover here - and assuming PhDs tightly coupled with the hardware can outperform an open framework/ push Triton to parity to CUDA over time.
Though apparently MI300X is a fine product as well. But it still needs code.
$665M USD isn't a staggering number by Silicon Valley standards, but it's very significant for a nation of five million people that hasn't seen global startup successes like neighboring Sweden with Spotify and others.
[1] The actual level of depression is somewhat hard to track because Finns are always pessimistic regardless of how well they're doing. (This also makes them the happiest people on Earth in polls. The situation right now is never quite as bad as one had expected beforehand, so when a pollster calls to ask, the conclusion must be that they're pretty happy with things overall at that specific moment, but surely everything is going in the wrong direction anyway.)
He also trashed a lot of good and useful software projects for seemingly protectionist reasons (if it wasn't ATI/Markham, it was dumped)
"In July 2024, Silo AI has 300+ employees out of which 125+ hold a PhD degree."
Of course there's room to debate the details here: would they have, perhaps, been better off investing that money in their existing software team(s)? Or spinning up (a) new team(s) from scatch? Who's to say. But at least it show some intention on their behalf to beef up their software stance, and generally speaking that feels like a positive step to me.
But then again, I'm an AMD fan boi who is invested in the ROCm ecosystem, so I'm not entirely unbiased. But I think the overall point stands, regardless of that.
https://www.silo.ai/blog/amd-to-acquire-silo-ai-to-expand-en...
I've no idea what is going on. This is 5 times bigger than their combined AI acquisitions in the last 12 months. The only link between Silo and AMD is that Silo has been using an AMD accelerator cluster for training.
Joint AMD / Silo AI press release: https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1206/am...
[1]: https://www.silo.ai/ [2]: https://huggingface.co/SiloAI
1. It’s a consulting firm and not a product shop, so you’re only paying for people, although they’ve from the start tried really hard to brand themselves as a startup.
2. They’ve been training an LLM, but mainly with tax payer money using a government super computer (that uses AMD chips), which is arguably their only product, but completely open source.
3. Some of the founders are well-connected in Finland which has given them a seat (and visibility) in goverment initiatives, but this is mainly BS.
4. They have the least rigorous hiring process I’ve ever witnessed.
I remember checking them out in 2018 when I was looking into switching companies. Back then when I checked their folks on LinkedIn, the prior experience in AI most of their people had was taking a few Coursera courses.
Later they called me and asked me about joining and I’ve never had an interview where no one asked anything technical beyond what I’ve worked on.
I also hope employees get something out of this, because their offer was a revenue share on billed hours and no mention of equity. However, my understanding is that they had a large investment from private equity (Altor), so the mission was to make the PE company money and not the employees.
They’ve allowed part-time offers where you still keep working at a university, so I assume this has been quite interesting for many researchers, i.e. you get paid some on top of the crappy university pay and you also get to see real problems that companies have.
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