AMD announced Monday it has reached a deal to acquire five-year-old Pensando for $1.9 billion to round out AMD’s data center product offerings.
Pensando’s board is chaired by former Cisco CEO John Chambers and the company has amassed an impressive array of customers in its short life, including cloud and enterprise customers such as Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.
AMD CEO Lisa Su described the purchase as important in helping provide a wide range of compute engines to help data centers provide hike performance and security and lower cost of ownership. The addition of Pensando’s distributed services platform to AMD’s EPYC line of CPUs and its GPUs and FPGAs “expands our ability to offer leadership solutions for cloud, enterprise and edge customers,” she said in a statement.
The Pensando platform includes a programmable packet processor that can be placed through a network to accelerate various infrastructure services at once, offloading workloads from CPUs and times the performance of the largest cloud provider and use less power. He said TCO of anything comparable is one-third as much.
Pensando CEO Prem Jain and the Pensando team, now about 350 employees, will be integrated into the AMD Data Center Solutions Group headed up by General Manager Forrest Norrod. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022.
Jain said Pensando has already deployed 100,000 of its platforms in less than five years.