US chipmaker AMD has finalized a $665 million (€614 million) agreement to acquire Finnish startup Silo AI, a prominent European artificial intelligence firm.
AMD announced the all-cash transaction on Wednesday, describing it as “a significant step” toward delivering comprehensive AI solutions. This acquisition is expected to enhance AMD’s capabilities to compete with Nvidia’s high-performance chips.
Silo AI, which bills itself as “Europe’s largest private AI lab,” is renowned for building large language models (LLMs), particularly for low-resource languages.
In May, the startup launched an LLM that supports Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, English, and programming languages. At that time, the company expressed its ultimate goal of developing LLMs for every EU language.
“We consider multilingual LLMs to constitute a part of Europe’s digital infrastructure,” said Peter Sarlin, Silo’s CEO, in an interview with TNW.
With this acquisition, Silo AI’s models will now become part of a US-based company. AMD stated that Silo’s team will focus on building LLMs on AMD’s platforms, potentially strengthening the software connection to AMD’s semiconductors.
The acquisition is still subject to regulatory approval, and AMD expects to finalize the deal in the second half of this year. If completed, this will be one of the largest-ever purchases of a European AI startup.
