AMD bets on silicon-etched AI models with Taalas acquisition

AMD has acquired Toronto-based AI-chip startup Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon to create model-specific MSICs and boost inference speeds. Early tests of Taalas’ HC1 chip reached about 16,960 tokens per second (roughly 48x faster than Nvidia GPUs), with HC2 targeting 20 billion parameters. AMD plans a disaggregated architecture pairing Instinct GPUs with Taalas accelerators, potentially lowering per-token costs but requiring model re-spins when weights change. The deal is expected to close in Q4, pending regulatory approval.