By Peace Longe
Publication Date: 2026-08-08 22:07:00
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has spent 2026 proving it can compete with Nvidia in the artificial intelligence race.
Its stock has more than doubled this year, and its data center business is growing fast.
Now AMD is trying something different.
The company just bought a small Toronto startup with a radical idea about how AI chips should be built.
The deal will not move AMD’s revenue this quarter, and it will not dent Nvidia’s lead right away.
But it points to where the next phase of the AI buildout is heading, and it could matter a great deal for the cloud companies that are running out of cheap electricity.
Here is what AMD bought, why it did it, and what it means if you own the stock.
AMD acquires Taalas to attack Nvidia’s grip on AI chips
Advanced Micro Devices announced on August 6 that it agreed to acquire Taalas, a Toronto startup that builds chips for AI inference. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Inference is the work of running a trained AI model to answer questions, the part users actually touch when they type a prompt.
More AI Chip Stocks:
Nvidia (NVDA) controls roughly 80% to 90% of the data center AI chip market, and its CUDA software keeps developers locked into its hardware.
By buying Taalas, AMD is signaling that general-purpose graphics processing units, the flexible chips that Nvidia dominates, are no longer the only way…