AMD follows in Nvidia’s footsteps with acquisition of AI infrastructure company
Table of Contents
Nvidia has been leading the charge when it comes to AI infrastructure and development. AMD has been left playing catch-up if it wants a share of the money being invested in AI projects. With this in mind, AMD has completed the acquisition of an AI infrastructure company.
An AMD press release announced the completion of the acquisition of ZT Systems, a “leading provider of AI and general-purpose compute infrastructure for the world's largest hyperscale providers.” The acquisition is aimed at improving AMD's involvement with AI projects, including AI infrastructure.
This purchase parallels a similar path taken by Nvidia when the company acquired Mellanox Technologies in 2019. Like ZT Systems, Mellanox is a supplier of computer network infrastructure, and has proven key in Nvidia's expansion in the AI sphere.
AMD is taking notes from The Nvidia Way
Last month, Tae Kim, author of The Nvidia Way, explained that Nvidia's advantage is in how it has the hardware and interconnectivity that its competitors lack: “This is why AMD can't compete, they don't have a 72-GPU AI server that has all the interconnects, all the networking, everything optimized.”
It seems AMD is recognising this gap in its capabilities and is planning on using ZT Systems to improve its network infrastructure. As Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions business unit at AMD, said in the press release: “With the rapid pace of innovation in AI, reducing the end-to-end design and deployment time of cluster-level data center AI systems will be a significant competitive advantage for our customers.”
The new end-to-end AI solutions proposed will use a combination of AMD CPU and GPU technology, along with open-source AMD ROCm software and rack-scale systems capabilities.
AMD still has some work to do to catch up with Nvidia, but they are not out of the race yet.
About the Author