AMD Doubles Down on Inference Efficiency with New Acquisitions
Last week, AMD announced two back-to-back acquisitions intended to strengthen its position in the AI market: first, AI software optimization startup Brium, and second, the engineering employees of AI inference chip developer Untether AI. The pair of disclosures came as the company is preparing for Advancing AI,an event later this week at which the company plans to unveil a 4-minute AI video and to showcase how AMD is advancing AI across industries.
With the cluster of events, we at TechArena decided to take a closer look at the acquisitions and what they mean for AMD’s AI strategy.
Brium: Optimization Software for the Inference Stack
AMD announced the acquisition of Brium on June 4 in a blog post by Anush Elangovan, corporate VP of software development. Elangovan hailed the start-up’s “team of world-class compiler and AI software experts with deep expertise in machine learning, AI inference, and performance optimization.” He added that this technological expertise will “play a key role” in enhancing AMD’s AIplatform.
The Brium team will play that role both through the software they bring to AMD and through the contributions of the new employees. Elangovan called out Brium’s unique ability to optimize the inference stack before a model reaches the hardware. He also named specific key projects that the Brium team will start contributing to in order to enable “faster, more efficient execution of AI models on AMD Instinct GPUs.”
Untether AI: Efficient AI Inference Chip Engineering Expertise
Untether AI, which was featured on our In the Arena podcast in January, was tackling inference efficiency from the hardware direction by focusing on AI accelerator products and a software development kit. As Untether AI’s Bob Beachler, said:
“We were really founded to solve inference compute in AI. Unlike training, which gets a lot of the press and heat right now, we know that inference is going to be a much larger marketplace because it’s going to run 24-7, 365.... [So we] really focused on how do you run AI inference as energy efficiently as possible.”
Untether’s solution was a novel “at-memory” compute architecture designed to minimize data movement and maximize compute performance. The company combined this with software optimization to further improve performance.
Per the terms of the sale that have been disclosed, AMD is acquiring and hiring Untether AI’s hardware and software engineers, but not the company as a whole. Untether AI will no longer sell or support its products because of the sale.
AMD Releases Cinematic AI Video Powered by AMD Instinct™ MI325X
Adding to the buzz, AMD this week dropped a cinematic, AI-generated, 4-minute video that spotlights innovation and was made using Instinct MI325X GPUs. Created in partnership with Higgsfield AI and TensorWave, the video features a brave developer who follows her intuition and discovers AMD ROCm, breaking it free and delivering the open software platform to developers everywhere – masterfully pulling through the company’s perpetual key message: Together we advance. With beautiful “cinematography” that feels reminiscent of Ready Player One, the video is expected to be showcased at the Advance AI event this week.
The TechArena Take
As a company that is continually experimenting with and adopting the latest AI image and video generation tools, our hats are off to AMD, Higgsfield AI and TensorWave for taking on the ambitious video project and knocking it out of the park. The gauntlet has been laid down.
With the two acquisitions by AMD focusing on inference efficiency, it’s clear that, in 2025, attention is turning to resource management with model deployment. As more real-world implementations take root, companies are considering the effects of power-hungry GPUs in inferencing workloads and looking at how those can be minimized.
AMD’s purchases look like a move to get ahead of escalating energy use associated with increasing inferencing workloads running from the data center to the edge. The dual acquisitions give them multiple options: increasing the efficiency of their GPU line up via software, or getting a jump start on new architectures for AI accelerators.
According to a recent LinkedIn post by Hugging Face product + growth manager Jeff Boudier, the open space community got early access to AMD’s new MI355X GPUs, and is impressed with what they are seeing. Hugging Face is currently running over80,000 tests on the new GPUs, which are manufactured with TSMC's 3nm node and built with AMD CDNA 4 architecture.
We’ll be following this week’s conference and related news closely.
Last week, AMD announced two back-to-back acquisitions intended to strengthen its position in the AI market: first, AI software optimization startup Brium, and second, the engineering employees of AI inference chip developer Untether AI. The pair of disclosures came as the company is preparing for Advancing AI,an event later this week at which the company plans to unveil a 4-minute AI video and to showcase how AMD is advancing AI across industries.
With the cluster of events, we at TechArena decided to take a closer look at the acquisitions and what they mean for AMD’s AI strategy.
Brium: Optimization Software for the Inference Stack
AMD announced the acquisition of Brium on June 4 in a blog post by Anush Elangovan, corporate VP of software development. Elangovan hailed the start-up’s “team of world-class compiler and AI software experts with deep expertise in machine learning, AI inference, and performance optimization.” He added that this technological expertise will “play a key role” in enhancing AMD’s AIplatform.
The Brium team will play that role both through the software they bring to AMD and through the contributions of the new employees. Elangovan called out Brium’s unique ability to optimize the inference stack before a model reaches the hardware. He also named specific key projects that the Brium team will start contributing to in order to enable “faster, more efficient execution of AI models on AMD Instinct GPUs.”
Untether AI: Efficient AI Inference Chip Engineering Expertise
Untether AI, which was featured on our In the Arena podcast in January, was tackling inference efficiency from the hardware direction by focusing on AI accelerator products and a software development kit. As Untether AI’s Bob Beachler, said:
“We were really founded to solve inference compute in AI. Unlike training, which gets a lot of the press and heat right now, we know that inference is going to be a much larger marketplace because it’s going to run 24-7, 365.... [So we] really focused on how do you run AI inference as energy efficiently as possible.”
Untether’s solution was a novel “at-memory” compute architecture designed to minimize data movement and maximize compute performance. The company combined this with software optimization to further improve performance.
Per the terms of the sale that have been disclosed, AMD is acquiring and hiring Untether AI’s hardware and software engineers, but not the company as a whole. Untether AI will no longer sell or support its products because of the sale.
AMD Releases Cinematic AI Video Powered by AMD Instinct™ MI325X
Adding to the buzz, AMD this week dropped a cinematic, AI-generated, 4-minute video that spotlights innovation and was made using Instinct MI325X GPUs. Created in partnership with Higgsfield AI and TensorWave, the video features a brave developer who follows her intuition and discovers AMD ROCm, breaking it free and delivering the open software platform to developers everywhere – masterfully pulling through the company’s perpetual key message: Together we advance. With beautiful “cinematography” that feels reminiscent of Ready Player One, the video is expected to be showcased at the Advance AI event this week.
The TechArena Take
As a company that is continually experimenting with and adopting the latest AI image and video generation tools, our hats are off to AMD, Higgsfield AI and TensorWave for taking on the ambitious video project and knocking it out of the park. The gauntlet has been laid down.
With the two acquisitions by AMD focusing on inference efficiency, it’s clear that, in 2025, attention is turning to resource management with model deployment. As more real-world implementations take root, companies are considering the effects of power-hungry GPUs in inferencing workloads and looking at how those can be minimized.
AMD’s purchases look like a move to get ahead of escalating energy use associated with increasing inferencing workloads running from the data center to the edge. The dual acquisitions give them multiple options: increasing the efficiency of their GPU line up via software, or getting a jump start on new architectures for AI accelerators.
According to a recent LinkedIn post by Hugging Face product + growth manager Jeff Boudier, the open space community got early access to AMD’s new MI355X GPUs, and is impressed with what they are seeing. Hugging Face is currently running over80,000 tests on the new GPUs, which are manufactured with TSMC's 3nm node and built with AMD CDNA 4 architecture.
We’ll be following this week’s conference and related news closely.
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