AMD is to buy Finnish artificial intelligence start-up Silo AI for $665mn in one of the largest such takeovers in Europe as the US chipmaker seeks to expand its AI services to compete with market leader Nvidia. California-based AMD said Silo’s 300-member team would use its software tools to build custom large language models (LLMs), the kind of AI technology that underpins chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. The all-cash acquisition is expected to close in the second half of this year, subject to regulatory approval. “This agreement helps us both accelerate our customer engagements and deployments while also helping us accelerate our own AI tech stack,” Vamsi Boppana, senior vice-president of AMD’s artificial intelligence group, told the Financial Times. The acquisition is the largest of a privately held AI start-up in Europe since Google acquired UK-based DeepMind for around £400mn in 2014, according to data from Dealroom. The deal comes at a time when buyouts by Silicon Valley companies have come under tougher scrutiny from regulators in Brussels and the UK. Europe-based AI start-ups including Mistral, DeepL and Helsing have raised hundreds of millions of dollars this year as investors seek out a local champion to rival US-based OpenAI and Anthropic. Helsinki-based Silo AI, which is among the largest private AI labs in Europe, offers tailored AI models and platforms to enterprise customers. The Finnish company launched an initiative last year to build LLMs in European languages including Swedish, Icelandic and Danish. AMD’s AI technology competes with that of Nvidia, which has taken the lion’s share of the high-performance chip market. Nvidia’s success has propelled its valuation past $3tn this year as tech companies push to build the computing infrastructure needed to power the biggest AI models. AMD started to roll out its MI300 chips late last year in a direct challenge to Nvidia’s “Hopper” line of chips. Peter Sarlin, Silo AI co-founder and chief executive, called the acquisition the “logical next step” as the Finnish group seeks to become a “flagship” AI company.
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