AMD announced on Monday that it will pay $4.9 billion for server vendor ZT Systems as part of its strategy to extend its portfolio of artificial intelligence chips and gear and compete with Nvidia.
Following the closing of the acquisition, the business intends to spin out and sell ZT’s manufacturing assets to concentrate on its systems design expertise.
Subject to regulatory approvals, the transaction is anticipated to close in the first half of 2025.
With hundreds of thousands of servers delivered annually and an estimated $10 billion in revenue, the company currently develops, integrates, produces, and deploys servers for businesses including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
Following Huawei’s same strategic move, ZT will use its expanded AI infrastructure to take against Nvidia.ZT Systems, located in Secaucus, New Jersey, will be folded into AMD’s Data Centre Solutions Business Group.
The company will sell off its data centre infrastructure manufacturing division, but the design and client teams will be kept on board.
AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su said: “Our 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.
“ZT adds world-class systems design and rack-scale solutions expertise that will significantly strengthen our data centre AI systems and customer enablement capabilities.”
The specifics of AMD’s “definitive agreement” to acquire ZT were revealed in the press statement.
“We are excited to join AMD and together play an even larger role designing the AI infrastructure that is defining the future of computing,” said Frank Zhang, CEO of ZT Systems.
We earlier reported that as a three-way competition with Intel intensifies, Nvidia and AMD each introduced their next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) chips independently in Taiwan.
