AMD gets the Nod

AMD says it will buy Nod.ai to boost its AI capabilities.

Nod.ai, a Santa Clara startup, has raised around $36.5 million, says PitchBook.

Nod.ai created the SHARK Machine Learning Distribution, which is built on LLVM, MLIR, OpenXLA’s IREE and Nod.ai’s tuning.

Nod.ai’s software can accelerate the deployment of AI models across systems using AMD’s Instinct data centre accelerators, Ryzen AI processors, EPYC processors, Versal SoCs and Radeon GPUs.

“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,” said Vamsi Boppana, svp, Artificial Intelligence Group AMD. “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.”

“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,” says Anush Elangovan, co-founder and CEO, Nod.ai. “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.“

AMD’s AI group employs 1,500 engineers mostly working on software.