Nvidia was rising early on Friday. The chip maker is looking to maintain its recent momentum ahead of earnings but rival Advanced Micro Devices has made an acquisition which could intensify its hardware competition.
Nvidia shares were up 1.4% in morning trading. The stock has gained 9% in the past five trading sessions, with shareholders seemingly enthusiastic about its coming earnings on Aug. 26.
However, investors will be keeping an eye on AMD’s plans. AMD said late Thursday that it had announced a deal to acquire Taalas, a specialist in chips for AI inference—the process of generating output from models—for an undisclosed price.
“AMD is building a full-stack AI platform that gives customers the flexibility to deploy the right compute solutions for every AI workload,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of the Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD, in a statement.
AMD shares were down 1.6% in morning trading.
The “full-stack” approach is a replica of Nvidia’s own efforts to broaden its AI chip market from its traditional strength in training models to inference, by purchasing a nonexclusive license for technology from privately held Groq, which also specializes in inference hardware. Nvidia paid $20 billion for Groq’s technology, including compensation packages for many of the company’s employees who joined Nvidia, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“We see the acquisition as strategic as AMD tries to close the gap with its much larger GPU rival,” wrote William Blair analyst Sebastien Naji in a research note. “Taalas is more unique in its model-specific approach and remains less proven—Groq was about to ramp up its third generation chip prior to the acquisition.”
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