AMD announced on August 6 the acquisition of Taalas, a Toronto-based startup specializing in AI inference chips. Taalas had raised $219 million in venture capital funding before this transaction. Its flagship HC1 accelerator delivers over 16,000 tokens per second per user, approximately 45 times faster than optimized Nvidia hardware, with an inference cost of about 0.75 cents per million tokens versus 3.79 cents for Nvidia. The major challenge lies in the fact that lenders do not know how to evaluate these single-model-dedicated chips as collateral, since if the model becomes obsolete, the chip loses all residual value. The transaction, whose amount has not been disclosed, is expected to close in 2026.
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