AMD Acquires Taalas: Etching LLM Weights Into Silicon at 17,000 Tokens/Second

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AMD Acquires Taalas: Etching LLM Weights Into Silicon at 17,000 Tokens/Second

On August 6, 2026, AMD announced it is acquiring Taalas, the Toronto AI chip startup that takes the most radical approach yet to inference: it etches model weights directly into silicon. The result is a chip that serves Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B at 17,000 tokens per second — claims of 48-73x faster than Nvidia’s flagship GPUs at a tenth of the power.

This is AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s $20 billion Groq deal — and it signals that the AI hardware war has moved from training to inference.

What Is Taalas?

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Toronto, Taalas is led by Ljubisa Bajic, a former AMD executive and former CEO of Tenstorrent. The company emerged from stealth in February 2026 with its first test chip, the HC1, fabricated on TSMC’s 6nm process.

Groq on SoloSoft

AMD Acquires Taalas: Etching LLM Weights Into Silicon at 17,000 Tokens/Second

AMD Acquires Taalas: Etching LLM Weights Into Silicon at 17,000 Tokens/Second

What Is Taalas?