AMD has acquired AI software startup Brium in a bid to chip away at Nvidia’s hold on the AI hardware market. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Brium specializes in making AI inference work across various hardware—from different chips to server setups. This means they can adjust AI software, enabling it to function on non-Nvidia hardware.
AMD aims for this acquisition to bolster an open AI software ecosystem. But let’s be real: it’s also about tackling the fact that most AI applications are tuned for Nvidia hardware. 
Brium’s recent blog post didn’t shy away from that reality. It noted:
“In recent years, the hardware industry has made strides towards providing viable alternatives to Nvidia hardware for server-side inference. Solutions such as AMD’s Instinct GPUs offer strong performance characteristics, but it remains a challenge to harness that performance in practice as workloads are typically tuned extensively with Nvidia GPUs in mind. At Brium, we intend to enable efficient [model] inference across a range of hardware architectures.”
This marks AMD’s fourth major acquisition in just two years, following its buys of Silo AI in July 2024, Nod.AI in October 2023, and Mipsology in August 2023.
AMD has not yet responded to requests for more information.
