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 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.
AMD described Taalas as âa pioneer in specialized AI inference silicon.â
âTaalasâ technology and world-class engineering team strengthen our AI portfolio by delivering differentiated inference performance and efficiency,â Vamsi Boppana, AMD senior vice-president of AMDâs AI group, said in a news release.
Taalas, which was recently featured in BetaKit Most Ambitious, 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).
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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. 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.
âWe 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,â Ljubisa Bajic said in the release.
AMD already has operations in Toronto and Canada, dating back to its purchase of Markham-based graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies in 2006.
The Taalas acquisition marks its second acquisition of a promising 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.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Alexandre DebiĂšve.