AMD’s Latest Acquisition

The recent acquisition by AMD may potentially reduce Nvidia’s dominance in the AI hardware market.

On Wednesday, semiconductor giant AMD announced the acquisition of Brium, an AI software optimization startup. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

About Brium

Brium, a startup that has been operating in stealth mode, focuses on developing machine learning applications. These applications enable AI inference across various hardware options, allowing trained AI models to draw conclusions from new data, as explained in a blog post on Brium’s website.

In simpler terms, Brium’s technology can adapt AI software to work with different AI hardware than it was originally designed for.

AMD’s Commitment to Open AI Ecosystem

According to a press release, AMD’s acquisition of Brium is intended to support its commitment to “building a high-performance, open AI software ecosystem that empowers developers and drives innovation.”

While AMD emphasizes the creation of a more open AI ecosystem, it is clear that this acquisition also aims to help AMD overcome a significant obstacle: a substantial portion of AI software is designed specifically for Nvidia hardware and chips.

Brium’s Perspective on the Industry

In its sole blog post, published in November 2024, Brium discussed the industry’s reliance on Nvidia and specifically mentioned AMD.

The blog post stated, “In recent years, the hardware industry has made strides towards providing viable alternatives to Nvidia hardware for server-side inference. Solutions like AMD’s Instinct GPUs offer strong performance characteristics, but it remains a challenge to harness that performance in practice as workloads are typically tuned extensively with Nvidia GPUs in mind. At Brium, we intend to enable efficient [model] inference across a range of hardware architectures.”

AMD’s Strategic Acquisitions

This acquisition marks AMD’s fourth strategic acquisition in the past two years, with the goal of fostering an open-source AI ecosystem, as stated in the press release. Previously, AMD acquired Silo AI (in July 2024), Nod.AI (in October 2023), and Mipsology (in August 2023).

TechCrunch has reached out to AMD for more information on this acquisition.