AMD said it will acquire ZT Systems in a deal valued at $4.9 billion in a move that will enables it to design integrated AI infrastructure with a focus on inferencing.
In a statement, AMD said the acquisition of ZT Systems is "the next major step in our long-term AI strategy to deliver leadership training and inferencing solutions that can be rapidly deployed at scale across cloud and enterprise customers." AMD's data center business has been surging.
ZT Systems provides compute, storage and GPU systems as well as integrated racks, edge computing gear and high-performance computing solutions. ZT Systems is also a part of the Open Compute Project.
For AMD, ZT Systems is the latest in a series of acquisitions. AMD recently acquired Silo AI for $665 million to build out its genAI stack.
With ZT Systems AMD is looking to combine its Instinct AI accelerators, EPYC server chips and networking gear to design integrated systems. AMD added that it will work with its ecosystem of original equipment manufacturing ecosystem to design data center systems.
- AMD acquires Silo AI for $665M as it builds out AI ecosystem, genAI stack
- AMD outlines new GPUs, Instinct accelerators with annual cadence
- AMD sees AI inference, training workloads increasing in enterprise
- AMD Q1 delivers data center, AI sales surge of 80%
Key points about the purchase:
- ZT Systems', based in Secaucus, NJ, counts some of the largest cloud providers as companies and is among the top providers of AI inference infrastructure.
- ZT Systems will be folded into AMD's data center business group. ZT CEO Frank Zhang will lead the manufacturing business and ZT President Doug Huang will lead the design and customer enablement teams. Both will report to Forrest Norrad, AMD Executive Vice President and General Manager.
- AMD plans to sell ZT Systems' US data center infrastructure manufacturing business.
- The purchase of ZT Systems is expected to be accretive to non-GAAP earnings.
- ZD Systems will add about 1,000 system design and enablement engineers.
- The purchase is expected to close in the first half of 2025.
