AMD announced on Thursday that it has reached an acquisition agreement to purchase Taalas, a Toronto-based AI inference chip startup. Taalas' chips are specifically designed for inference tasks and can be customized or hardwired for a single AI model, rather than being general-purpose. While this technology sacrifices versatility, it enables the creation of lower-cost chips. Taalas claims that for specific models, its chips can deliver output thousands of times faster than traditional GPUs. AMD did not disclose the specific acquisition amount. Founded in 2023, Taalas has already secured $219 million in venture capital.