• AMD has announced that it will acquire Nod.ai to accelerate its AI solution development.
• The acquisition is a clear play to push into the AI space currently dominated by Nvidia and Intel.
• The acquisition is expected to close this quarter.

Back in August Nvidia announced that it had generated $13.5 billion in revenue during the second quarter of the year. That record figure was driven largely by the demand for chips to be used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

To that end, Nvidia earned $6.18 billion in profit from its data center business, an 843 percent increase compared to the same quarter last year.

AMD meanwhile, isn’t as competitive in the AI space, a fact it hopes to change with its acquisition of Nod.ai.

“Nod.AI is an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning systems company that provides key enabling open source technologies for future A.I systems using advanced compiler-based approaches (instead of legacy handwritten kernels). We created the SHARK Machine Learning Distribution that is built on LLVM, MLIR, OpenXLA’s IREE and nod.ai’s tuning. We leverage Machine Learning based methods (Reinforcement Learning in particular) for codegen and auto-scheduling of compute and communication over a heterogeneous set of resources (such as CPUs, GPUs, Accelerators etc)” says Nod.ai of its operations.

According to Team Red, Nod.ai will help to accelerate the deployment of AI solutions for data center products, Ryzen AI processors, EPYC processors, Radeon GPUs and more. The key here is the mention of the strategy revolving around an open software ecosystem. This lowers the barrier for entry for customers through developer tools, libraries, and models.

“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,” senior vice president of the Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD, Vamsi Boppana said in a press release.

“The addition of the talented Nod.ai team accelerates our ability to advance open-source compiler technology and enable portable, high-performance AI solutions across the AMD product portfolio. Nod.ai’s technologies are already widely deployed in the cloud, at the edge and across a broad range of end point devices today,” the SVP added.

While the value of the acquisition wasn’t disclosed, according to an AMD spokesperson who spoke to CNBC, the acquisition is expected to close this quarter.

“At Nod.ai, we are a team of engineers focused on problem solving — quickly – and moving at pace in an industry of constant change to develop solutions for the next set of problems,” co-founder and chief executive officer at Nod.ai, Anush Elangovan said of the acquisition.

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

We’re curious to see how quickly AMD accelerates its AI solutions as well as how and where these are deployed. The firm enters the market where Nvidia and Intel are dominant forces.

With that having been said, AMD has a history of upending markets. The firm’s FidelityFX Super Resolution is one such solution that brings upscaling and frame generation tech to more GPUs, including Nvidia brand cards.

With the firm bringing that mentality to the AI space, the entire space could be disrupted for the better.