PC component manufacturer AMD on Tuesday said that it has agreed a deal to acquire artificial intelligence (AI) startup Nod.ai.

AMD, which did not disclose the terms of the deal, is attempting to catch-up with historic rival Nvidia which has heavily invested in the AI chip market.

In a statement, AMD said that the agreement “strongly aligns” with its AI growth strategy centred on an open software ecosystem that lowers the barriers of entry for customers through developer tools, libraries and models. The company intends on investing in and building a unified collection of software to power its chip development.

Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president, Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD, said: “The acquisition of Nod.ai is expected to significantly enhance our ability to provide AI customers with open software that allows them to easily deploy highly performant AI models tuned for AMD hardware.”

The executive added that the acquisition “accelerates our ability to advance open-source compiler technology and enable portable, high-performance AI solutions across the AMD product portfolio.”

The nascent AI group which will house Nod.ai was created earlier this year and employs around 1,500 engineers. AMD said it plans to hire at least 300 additional staff to the team by the end of 2023 with further hires set for next year.

Anush Elangovan, co-founder and chief executive officer at Nod.ai, said: “Our journey as a company has cemented our role as the primary maintainer and major contributor to some of the world's most important AI repositories, including SHARK, Torch-MLIR and OpenXLA/IREE code generation technology.

“By joining forces with AMD, we will bring this expertise to a broader range of customers on a global scale.”

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