AMD discloses $2.9-billion price for planned Taalas takeover

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said Wednesday that it will pay about US$2.9 billion for Toronto-based semiconductor startup Taalas Inc. in a cash-and-stock acquisition announced in August. The company disclosed the price in a securities filing, while the deal remains subject to regulatory approval and other conditions and has not yet closed.

Deal terms and valuation

AMD said US$1.4 billion of the purchase amount depends on unspecified conditions. The transaction would be one of the largest takeovers of a Canadian technology company. It is larger than Nasdaq Inc.'s US$2.75 billion purchase of Verafin Inc. in November 2020, but smaller than Ecolab Inc.'s agreement to buy Calgary-based CoolIT Systems for US$4.75 billion in March.

Taalas had raised more than US$225 million in venture financing, including a US$169 million round in February that included Fidelity Management & Research Co. and San Francisco-based Quiet Capital. As part of its Series B funding round in November 2025, Taalas issued new equity at US$94.51 per share, implying a valuation of more than US$750 million based on shares authorized at the time. CEO Ljubisa Bajic said at the time that the startup had 24 employees and had spent just US$30 million of its cash.

Taalas and its AI chip focus

Taalas was co-founded in August 2023 by former long-time AMD executives Ljubisa Bajic and Lejla Bajic and Drago Ignjatovic. The startup set out to meet demand for chips that run large language models and the generative tools they power. Rather than building general-purpose processors, it sought faster and more energy-efficient semiconductors designed for specific AI systems. Its first chip was tailored to Meta Platforms Inc.'s Llama family of large language models.

AMD said in August that it would integrate Taalas's technology into future chips designed for inference, the process of running AI models to produce outputs such as text, images or the actions of AI agents. At the time, AMD chief software officer Andrej Zdravkovic, who is based in Toronto, said in a social media post that the Taalas team would join AMD's Canadian workforce.

AMD's broader AI strategy

AMD has made a series of acquisitions as it tries to catch up to Nvidia Corp., which dominates the market for chips used to train and run AI models. In September, AMD announced it was buying World Labs, a San Francisco-based AI company, for US$8.2 billion. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li co-founded World Labs, which developed world models. World Labs was backed by Radical Ventures, a Toronto-headquartered tech investor where Ms. Li is a scientific partner.

In June 2025, AMD agreed to hire the engineering employees of Toronto-based Untether, a chip startup that subsequently shut down. AMD has more than 3,800 employees in Canada, including many engineering and other technical staff, and has maintained a major office in Markham, Ont., since acquiring ATI Technologies in October 2006.

Heating inference market

The market for AI inference chips is heating up as cloud services and businesses seek cheaper alternatives to Nvidia's processors to run generative tools and AI agents. Last month, Tenstorrent Holdings Inc. raised US$1.5 billion in a financing that valued the company at US$6.2 billion. Backers included Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Sandisk Corp. and T. Rowe Price.

Taalas CEO Mr. Bajic founded Tenstorrent in Toronto in March 2016 after leaving AMD. He gave up the CEO role to early investor Jim Keller, a prominent chip designer, in October 2022 and left the firm a few months later. Tenstorrent relocated to the United States in November 2023.

Earlier coverage: AMD acquired Taalas (August 2026)

Sources: The Globe and Mail