AMD has just confirmed that it completed its acquisition of Silo AI. It has only been a month since AMD first announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Silo AI in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $665 million. At that time, it was expected to close in the second half of 2024. Just like with most timelines that CEO Lisa Su and her team put out, AMD executed not just on-time but much earlier than expected.

Silo AI is Europe’s largest private AI lab and provides not only highly skilled and proven AI scientists and engineers, but also an established customer base for which Silo AI has developed tailored AI models, platforms and solutions. While most of the current Silo AI customers are in Europe, AMD will add a global customer base for future engagements while enhancing AMD’s AI solutions. Silo AI currently boasts a stable of top-tier enterprise customers, such as Allianz, Rolls-Royce and Unilever.

Strategically, this acquisition is a strong fit coming at an optimum time. Generative AI is transitioning from its early experimental stages to its value creation stage where enterprises are trying to find ways to harness its power to drive both top-line and bottom-line growth. A key to harnessing the power of generative AI is enabling enterprises to rapidly and cost effectively train large language models (LLMs) on company-specific or proprietary data for applications that are customized to the specific needs of the enterprise.

Silo AI enables AMD to offer this capability to all potential customers using any AI infrastructure—especially AMD-based platforms. Additionally, Silo AI helps AMD to better compete with a full stack solution by developing new, open-sourced LLMs optimized for AMD platforms. Additionally, it is not too much of a stretch to envision AMD using Silo AI experts to help port CUDA-developed models to ROCm-models to make the transition easier from Nvidia-based platforms to AMD-based platforms.

The generative AI competitive landscape is currently driven by Nvidia, but AMD has risen as a valuable alternative. However, gaining market share from an established incumbent requires expertise in aiding potential customers to make the transition as pain free and cost effective as possible. The Silo AI acquisition is a major step towards helping AMD accomplish this, as well as providing customized AI model and solution development capabilities once the customer has made the transition.

 ----Form EE Times