- AMD
- NVDA
Silicon Valley chip giant Advanced Micro Devices Inc. announced on Thursday that it will buy Toronto-founded Taalas Inc. for an undisclosed price, making Taalas the latest high-potential Canadian semiconductor startup to be acquired by an American company or leave for the United States.
Last June, AMD bought Toronto-founded Untether AI Corp. while Nvidia Corp. purchased CentML Inc., also founded in Toronto, in the same month. Tenstorrent Inc. relocated from Toronto to the U.S. in 2023 citing investor requirements.
With AMD’s latest deal, Canada has now lost its three marquee chip companies, said Daniel Wigdor, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto and cofounder and chief executive of AXL Labs, a venture studio that aims to build 50 applied artificial intelligence companies.
“Canada’s place in the (AI) inference market right now is a supplier of brilliant people and foundational ideas to companies headquartered somewhere else,” he said.
Wigdor said that outflow can be attributed to Canada’s lack of institutions to truly help a startup grow and scale, pointing to the United States’ Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as an example of an organization that does the applied work of studying emerging technologies, market needs and funding large and ambitious projects.
“These acquisitions are a verdict on how little we’ve built to build technologies into complete products and ecosystems,” Wigdor said.
It also highlights that homegrown chip startups continue to struggle to access capital and the steps needed to move from research to commercialization: namely, late-stage venture capital, strategic partnerships and customer access executive director of C100, an organization connecting Canadian founders with Silicon Valley networks and funding
“That still lives almost entirely in the U.S. and specifically in Silicon Valley,” he said. “So when AMD buys Taalas, it isn’t just buying the intellectual property. It’s buying the team and the trajectory that Canada’s ecosystem couldn’t fully carry at scale.”
As chip companies continue to jockey for market share in the multi-billion-dollar AI boom, AMD said that it acquired the Toronto company to enhance its current and future hardware to improve its AI inference capabilities by integrating Taalas’ technology into its own. Inference is the process whereby a trained AI model generates output from data, such as a prediction or an image.
Founded in 2023 by former engineers from AMD and Tenstorrent, Taalas makes customized chips that involve printing parts of an AI model onto silicon, which allows AI applications to run faster and cheaper than traditional approaches.
