AMD Makes A New Open-Source AI Software Acquisition

It was just a few weeks ago that AMD acquired AI software company Mipsology to help their AI software efforts on FPGAs. Today AMD announced another notable AI software acquisition: open-source AI software vendor Nod.ai.

AMD is acquiring Nod.ai to gain greater experience in open-source AI software capabilities. The Nod.ai team will be helping with AI software efforts across AMD Instinct, Ryzen, EPYC, and Versal product families.

Nod.ai is the company behind the SHARK Machine Learning Distribution built atop LLVM, MLIR, and IREE. Since 2013, Nod.ai has been working on enabling AI from mobile phones to hyperscaler deployments.

"Nod.ai delivers optimized AI solutions to top hyperscalers, enterprises and startups. The compiler-based automation software capabilities of Nod.ai’s SHARK software reduce the need for manual optimization and the time required to deploy highly performant AI models to run across a broad portfolio of data center, edge and client platforms powered by AMD CDNA™, XDNA™, RDNA™ and “Zen” architectures."

The Nod.ai acquisition in particular should help with greater developer talent around the all-important LLVM and MLIR compiler infrastructure.

More details on AMD acquiring Nod.ai via the just-issued press release.

The hardware execution at AMD has been firing on all cylinders the past few years while it's on the software ecosystem side where they have more ground to cover for competing with NVIDIA CUDA as well as Intel's robust oneAPI offerings. Fortunately the situation seems to be changing with AMD committing more resources to ROCm, these recent AMD software acquisitions, and their continued investments into open-source drivers and related Linux infrastructure. Hopefully all of the AMD AI software (and ROCm improvements) will begin bearing fruits as we move into 2024.