AMD set to acquire open-source AI Nod.ai

The vendor is hoping to enhance its deployment of AI solutions

AMD is expanding its open AI software capabilities with the acquisition of Nod.ai.

The deal is hoped to enhance the deployment of AI solutions for the vendor's technology such as it's instinct datacentre accelerators, Ryzen AI processors, EPYC processors, Versal SoCs and Radeon GPUs to AMD.

The agreement is in line with the company's AI growth strategy centre on an open software ecosystem that lowers the barriers of entry for customers through developer tools, libraries and models.

As part of this strategy, AMD also acquired Mipsology earlier this year with the aim of ramping up AI inference rivalry with Nvidia.

"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, senior vice president of the AI group at 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."

Anush Elangovan, co-founder and CEO of Nod.ai also commented: "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.

"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."

Nod.ai delivers optimised AI solutions to top hyperscalers, enterprises and startups.

The compiler-based automation software capabilities of Nod.ai's SHARK software is designed to reduce the need for manual optimisation and the time required to deploy AI models to run across a broad portfolio of data centre, edge, and client platforms.