AMD acquired Canadian AI chip startup Taalas, saying it plans to integrate Taalas’ technology to “develop system-level solutions with AMD Instinct" graphic processing units (GPUs). In a statement, AMD said the acquisition will allow the company to help customers deploy inference workloads more efficiently across a growing range of applications. Taalas was founded in August 2023 by Ljubisa Bajic, a former architect at both AMD and Nvidia and Tenstorrent co-founder, alongside engineers Drago Ignjatovic and Lejla Bajic. In February 2026, the startup raised $169 million to support the development of chips that have been optimized for specific AI models. At the same time, Taalas also unveiled its first chip, the HC1 Technology Demonstrator, which has been optimized to run the open-source Llama 3.1 8B language model.