AMD acquires an AI startup led by former Neuralink engineers as part of ongoing strategic acquisitions.
AMD announced the completion of its acquisition of MK1, a Mountain View, California-based provider of inference and enterprise AI software, according to Anush Elangovan, AMD's corporate vice president of software development. The startup was founded by Paul Merolla, a Neuralink co-founder who co-led chip design and the development of algorithms that decode brain activity, and Thong Wei Koh, a former team lead at Neuralink who focused on brain neural signal processing. The MK1 team, which includes other former engineers at Neuralink, Meta, Tesla and Apple, will join AMD's Artificial Intelligence Group, where their technology and expertise will play a key role in advancing AMD's high-speed inference and enterprise AI stack.
MK1 has been focused on "high-speed inference and reasoning-based AI technologies optimized for large-scale deployments" running on AMD hardware, currently serving more than 1 trillion tokens a day. The company's Flywheel and comprehension engines are designed to take advantage of the memory architecture of AMD's Instinct GPUs. According to Elangovan, the combination of MK1's software and AMD's Instinct GPUs will enable the delivery of "accurate, cost-effective and fully traceable reasoning at scale," referring to the process at the heart of agentic AI workloads. AMD's Instinct GPUs have gained momentum in the AI infrastructure market following the company's strategic partnership with OpenAI to deploy 6 gigawatts of Instinct-based infrastructure.
The acquisition is part of AMD's broader expansion in AI capabilities. The Santa Clara, California-based company announced the MK1 acquisition after disclosing that it paid $36 million on acquisitions outside its blockbuster $4.9 billion ZT Systems deal earlier this year to boost its AI and data center capabilities. Those earlier acquisitions consisted of silicon photonics startup Enosemi, which AMD acquired to "support and develop a variety of photonics and co-packaged optics solutions across next-gen AI systems;" compiler startup Brium, which the company is using to provide "highly optimized AI solutions;" and the technical employees of AI chip startup Untether AI. Elangovan stated that "together, we'll accelerate the next generation of enterprise AI, enabling customers to automate complex business processes and unlock new opportunities in high-value applications."
AMD's acquisition strategy is yielding results as the company reported a "sharp" jump in sales for its CPUs across the PC and server segments as well as its Instinct data center GPUs, delivering record revenue of $9.2 billion for the third quarter. The company has leaned heavily into acquisitions over the past few years to flesh out its GPU, system and software capabilities in its growing rivalry with Nvidia in the AI infrastructure market. AMD's largest acquisition this year, ZT Systems, has been particularly instrumental in developing rack-scale AI solutions based on its Instinct GPUs and helping the company win over major customers including OpenAI. The company sold the manufacturing unit of ZT Systems to U.S. electronics services giant Sanmina for $3 billion in October, while keeping the business' design and customer enablement teams.