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The semiconductor giant is beefing up its data centre offering as it looks to compete with rivals such as Intel and Nvidia.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced today (4 April) that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Pensando for approximately $1.9bn.
Pensando is a cloud start-up with a distributed services platform that includes a high-performance, fully programmable packet processor and comprehensive software stack.
It was founded in 2017 by a group of former Cisco engineers and its customers include Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
The deal is expected to help AMD boost its data centre offering and compete with the likes of Intel and Nvidia, which already offer data centre packages.
Pensando CEO Prem Jain and rest of the team will join AMD as part of its Data Center Solutions Group, led by AMD senior vice-president and general manager Forrest Norrod.
Jain said he is excited to join AMD. “In less than five years, Pensando has assembled a best-in-class engineering team that are experts in building systems together with a rich, deep ecosystem of partners and customers who have currently deployed over 100,000 Pensando platforms into production,” he said.
“Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our core business and enable us to pursue a much larger customer base across more markets.”
AMD chair and CEO Dr Lisa Su said: “To build a leading-edge data centre with the best performance, security, flexibility and lowest total cost of ownership requires a wide range of compute engines.
“The Pensando team brings world-class expertise and a proven track record of innovation at the chip, software and platform level which expands our ability to offer leadership solutions for our cloud, enterprise and edge customers.”
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022, following satisfaction of customary closing conditions.
In October 2020, AMD acquired fellow chip maker Xilinx in a $35bn deal, creating a combined company that employs 13,000 engineers.
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