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AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

ft.com

121–130 of 284 posts

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#121
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there is some overlap. Is that overlap worth 665M?

Yes, it brought instantly (at least partially) +12B USD on the valuation of AMD. This shows to investors that AMD is still in the race.

You shouldn't attribute that on the acquisition. The stock went 3.8% up today but also 4% up on monday, 4.8% up last Friday 4.2% up last Tuesday etc.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes that the reason AMD's software stack sucks is because of skill, not company culture, management or other reasons that won't change with this acquisition.

If it's a culture problem and the C-suite is aware of it, then one reason to buy a company with a working software stack is to percolate their culture into your company so you can be successful.

I have a friend working there and it's a bunch of old curmudgeons stuck in their way. Good luck changing culture with a single acquisition

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employee loyalty isn’t a good thing. One of the best things about Silicon Valley is that people can swiftly change companies when they get higher offers. Non-competes are void in California. There’s a reason US salaries for software devs are 2-5x EU salaries for similar roles.

What if I told you that non - competes aren't a thing in Germany. (And a big part in other parts of US)

Well I'd tell you that they aren't a thing in California.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#124

I've been thinking that NVDA stock is massively overpriced - yes, AI is a hot topic, but their only advantage is the software stack. It is just a matter of time until Intel and AMD realize that they should join hands and do an open-source CUDA alternative for their respecitve GPUs (yes, Intel has competetive GPUs and just like AMD and Nvidia they will try to get a share of the AI chip market share).

NVDA's moat is over-stated. There are several deep-pocketed players with pretty good AI chips. The big players are training models at such a large scale that they can afford to back them by different architectures. Smaller players use frameworks like Pytorch and Tensorflow, but those are backed by big players buying from Nvidia.

But valuation isn't the NVDA trade right now; it's that there's still a bigger fool.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, nvidia spends a lot of time and money developing software that induces demand for their GPUs.

The biggest frameworks are still from other players though. Pytorch, tensorflow and jax aren't funded by Nvidia.

No way would any of those have any have bindings to backend libraries like cuDNN.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#126
post #60

Happy to see this acquisition landing in Finland, but I have to wonder how the purchase price is justified. Silo AI is primarily a consulting company doing "traditional" kinds of AI consulting projects. Their LLM project is like a side hustle for the company.

Personally, I am bit sad that nothing stays in Finland. Too many promising companies have been sold into foreign countries recently. Just because founders look for exit strategy (not claiming that it is the case here). Not good for Finland in general.

But hats off to Finland for producing these companies. Here in Sweden there’s pretty much nothing in cloud computing or AI, AFAIK.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#127
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2024 YTD returns: NVDA 172% AMD 27% INTC -30%

Stocks of companies that develop extremely niche and technical things is a tiny sliver of the stock market that I actually think communities like HN would be better at valuing than the market. Technology stocks are the only ones I personally day trade for that reason. Example: at the beginning of a pandemic lockdowns, any HN user could have anticipated increased internet usage and buy Cloudflare/Fastly stock and made…

Intel's profit, and revenue, have declined for 3 consecutive years. Their price to earnings ratio is 36.

Nvidia's revenue is now greater than Intel's with 20% of the employees that Intel has. Their PE ratio is 78, roughly double that of Intel.

The market valued Nvidia as growing and Intel as not.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#128
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel has competitive GPUs No they don't. Both Intel and AMD compare their newest GPU favorably against Nvidia's H100 that has been on the market longer and soon to be replaced and then it's never H100 NVL for a reason. Intel and AMD can sell their GPU's only with lower profit margin. If they could match FLOPS per total ownership they would sell much better. Both are years behind.

Benchmarks were just run, MI300x is onpar/better than an H100. Next generation of MI (MI325x) is coming out end of the year and those specs look fantastic too. Especially on the all important memory front. 288GB is fantastic. Both companies will leapfrog each other with new releases. Anyone who believes that there should only be a single vendor for all AI compute will quickly find themselves on the wrong side of hist…

Comparisons against H100 I have seen are always:

  8x AMD MI300X (192GB, 750W)   
  8x H100 SXM5 (80GB, 700W) 
Never against 8x H100 NVL (188GB, What the customer does not see is how AMD must spend 2 times more money to produce a chip that is competitive against architecture that is soon 2 years old.

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like an excellent exit strategy in hindsight. Spend a gazillion dollars of investor money on AMD hardware, get bought back by AMD because you worked out how to use that hardware

Except the EU paid for the hardware https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/supercomputers/our-supercompute...

Where in that source does it claim that Silo didn't have to pay to use the hardware?

Re: AMD to buy Silo AI for $665M

#130
post #21

Since FT is paywalled and the press release link from Silo is currently pointig to nowhere: https://www.silo.ai/blog/amd-to-acquire-silo-ai-to-expand-en... I've no idea what is going on. This is 5 times bigger than their combined AI acquisitions in the last 12 months. The only link between Silo and AMD is that Silo has been using an AMD accelerator cluster for training.

I honestly don't understand how paywalled links get so much traction, most people probably can't even engage with the material. Thanks for the direct link to Silo AI's press release!

Because everyone knows how to use archive.org
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