TORONTO
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will pay about US$2.9 billion to acquire Toronto-based semiconductor startup Taalas Inc., one of the largest takeovers of a Canadian technology company on record.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker announced the deal in August and disclosed the price in a securities filing Wednesday.
The cash-and-stock acquisition includes US$1.4 billion tied to unspecified conditions, AMD said.
"The Taalas team would be joining AMD’s Canadian work force," AMD chief software officer Andrej Zdravkovic, who is based in Toronto, said in a social media post in August.
The transaction still requires regulatory approval and has yet to close.
The purchase tops the US$2.75 billion that Nasdaq Inc. paid in November 2020 for St. John's-based cybersecurity startup Verafin Inc. It ranks behind only Ecolab Inc.'s US$4.75-billion agreement in March to buy Calgary-based data-centre cooling equipment maker CoolIT Systems.
Taalas was co-founded in August 2023 by former long-time AMD executives Ljubisa Bajic, Lejla Bajic and Drago Ignjatovic.
The startup designs chips specifically for AI inference, the process of running AI models to produce outputs like text or images, rather than building general-purpose processors.
Its first chip was tailored to Meta Platforms Inc.'s Llama family of large language models, which have been widely used and modified because they are freely available.
AMD plans to integrate Taalas's technology into future chips designed for inference.
The deal represents a substantial jump in Taalas's valuation. The startup issued new equity in its Series B funding round in November 2025 at US$94.51 per share, implying a valuation of more than US$750 million based on shares authorized at the time.
Taalas had raised over US$225 million in venture financing, including a US$169-million round in February backed by Fidelity Management & Research Co. and San Francisco-based Quiet Capital.
At that point, CEO Ljubisa Bajic said the startup had 24 employees and had spent just US$30 million of its cash.
The acquisition is part of a broader buying spree as AMD tries to close the gap with Nvidia Corp., which dominates the market for chips that train and run AI models.
In September, AMD announced it would buy San Francisco-based AI company World Labs for US$8.2 billion. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li co-founded the startup, which was backed by Toronto-headquartered investor Radical Ventures, where Li is a scientific partner.
In June 2025, AMD agreed to hire the engineering employees of Toronto-based chip startup Untether, which subsequently shut down.
AMD employs more than 3,800 people in Canada, many in engineering and technical roles. The company has maintained a major office in Markham, Ont., since acquiring ATI Technologies, then Canada's second-largest technology company, in October 2006.
The market for AI inference chips is intensifying as cloud services and businesses look for cheaper alternatives to Nvidia's processors.
Last month, Tenstorrent Holdings Inc. raised US$1.5 billion at a US$6.2-billion valuation from backers including Fidelity and Morgan Stanley.
Bajic founded Tenstorrent in Toronto in March 2016 after leaving AMD, but stepped down as CEO in October 2022 and left the firm a few months later. Tenstorrent relocated to the United States in November 2023.
This story was written by the e2gold.ca newsroom from reporting by The Globe and Mail, news.lavx.hu and Rich Picks Daily. Quotes are checked word for word against that reporting.