AMD has agreed to acquire Nod.ai, an open source software company it has worked with before on machine learning projects, as the semiconductor giant looks to better position itself in the market for AI hardware and software.
Financial terms were not disclosed, and AMD declined to discuss its broader acquisition strategy, but a company spokesperson said via email that AMD and Nod.ai are well acquainted with one another.
“AMD and Nod.ai have engaged on multiple machine learning model optimization projects in the past,” the spokesperson said. “Currently, AMD is working with Nod.ai to optimize deployment of LLM models on AMD hardware.”
“The acquisition of Nod.ai is expected to significantly enhance our ability to provide AI customers with open software that allows them to easily deploy highly performant AI models tuned for AMD hardware,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president, Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD, in a statement. “The addition of the talented Nod.ai team accelerates our ability to advance open-source compiler technology and enable portable, high-performance AI solutions across the AMD product portfolio. Nod.ai’s technologies are already widely deployed in the cloud, at the edge and across a broad range of end point devices today.”
Jack Gold, president and principal analyst of J. Gold Associates, told Fierce Electronics that the deal reflects a recent shift in the AI chip market.
“The race in AI these days is not just about silicon – it’s about focusing on compilers and optimization of code across multiple compute engines (e.g., NPU, GPU, CPU, etc.),” Gold said via email. “What AMD is looking for is a way to differentiate in the software area, and specifically by having Nod.ai ‘tune’ various AI models to run best on its hardware. It’s not just about building the best brute force hardware anymore. It’s also about optimizing the code to run on the available resources in the most efficient manner, both for performance but also for cost optimization. And many workloads don’t need to run on the most expensive Nvidia hardware to be effective.”
Recent AI moves by AMD, Intel and others have been viewed as shots across the bow of Nvidia, but that is what happens when one company seems to jump out and dominate a market in its early stages. In truth, many companies are jockeying for position, and software has become a key fighting ground.
“This is really the next battlefield for AI dominance, but clearly AMD is not alone in making this type of play (Intel and Nvidia, along with the hyperscalers all have efforts in this space),” Gold said.
AMD in a statement described Nod.ai as having technology that “accelerates the deployment of AI solutions optimized for AMD Instinct data center accelerators, Ryzen AI processors, EPYC processors, Versal SoCs and Radeon GPUs… The compiler-based automation software capabilities of Nod.ai’s SHARK software reduce the need for manual optimization and the time required to deploy highly performant AI models to run across a broad portfolio of data center, edge and client platforms powered by AMD CDNA, XDNA, RDNA and ‘Zen’ architectures.