US chip giant AMD to acquire Taalas

American semiconductor giant Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced today that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Toronto-based Taalas, which aims to hardwire AI models directly onto the chips that power them.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction remains subject to closing conditions and regulatory approval.

“Joining AMD will give us the scale, engineering resources, and global reach to accelerate our innovation.”

Taalas was founded in 2023 by a trio of former AMD employees and leaders at Toronto-founded, now Santa Clara, California-based AI chipmaker Tenstorrent. This group includes Taalas CEO Ljubisa Bajic (co-founder and ex-CEO, CTO, and president of Tenstorrent), COO Lejla Bajic, and CTO Drago Ignjatovic.

The company emerged from stealth in 2024, revealing $50 million in funding from Quiet Capital and Pierre Lamond, among others. It announced another $169 million earlier this year from a group that included Fidelity.

Santa Clara, California-based AMD described Taalas as “a pioneer in specialized AI inference silicon.” According to AMD, Taalas’ tech “optimizes AI inference dataflows, significantly reducing compute and memory bottlenecks associated with general-purpose architectures.”

“Taalas’ technology and world-class engineering team strengthen our AI portfolio by delivering differentiated inference performance and efficiency,” Vamsi Boppana, AMD senior vice-president of AMD’s AI group, said in a news release.

Taalas hopes to dramatically boost AI efficiency using hard-wired computation to convert AI models into custom silicon capable of replacing general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs).

Taalas, which aims to offer faster and cheaper hardware for an AI-hungry world, has claimed it can launch new chips in just two months, well faster than the industry standard, which often takes upward of one to two years. The startup is betting it can produce models that are a thousand times more efficient than their software counterparts, with single chips that could outperform small GPU data centres.

“We founded Taalas to rethink AI inference from the ground up by building the hardware around the model … Joining AMD will give us the scale, engineering resources, and global reach to accelerate our innovation,” Ljubisa Bajic said in the release.

As the world shifts from training AI models to deploying them at scale, the market for AI inference—when a model applies its training to generate outputs—is heating up.

AMD plans to integrate Taalas’ tech into both its existing and future offerings. The chip giant already has operations in Toronto and Canada, dating back to its purchase of Markham-based graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies in 2006. The company said this deal “reflects a continued commitment to retaining and growing Canadian talent.”

The Taalas acquisition marks AMD’s second purchase of a Canadian AI chip firm in just over a year. In 2025, AMD struck a deal to acquire the team behind Toronto startup Untether AI, which had been developing AI inference chips that it marketed as faster and more energy-efficient than its rivals.

AMD, which trades on the Nasdaq, is also an investor in Toronto-based large language model maker Cohere and quantum computer developer Xanadu.

Between Taalas, Untether, Tenstorrent, and CentML, which was acquired by current AI semiconductor market leader, Santa Clara-based Nvidia in 2025, four of Toronto’s most promising chip startups have either recently been acquired by or inked deals to sell to major US players, or in Tenstorrent’s case, redomiciled there. Ottawa-based semiconductor startup Hyperlume was also purchased by San Jose’s Credo in 2025.

Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Alexandre Debiève.