AMD receives an AI boost as its ZT Systems acquisition completes

AMD buys a wealth of engineering talent with their ZT systems acquisition

AMD has confirmed that they have completed its acquisition of ZT Systems (ZTS), the privately owned systems/server manufacturer. This acquisition cost $4.9 billion and greatly expands the company’s pool of engineers.

AMD has made it clear that they do not want to compete with its customers and start manufacturing servers. This means that AMD now needs to sell the manufacturing arm of ZTS, as AMD’s interested in ZT Systems’ engineers, not its manufacturing capabilities.

Frank Zhang, ZTS’ Founder and former CEO, has joined AMD as senior vice president of ZT Manufacturing. He will act under Forrest Norrod and help lead AMD’s divestiture of ZTS’ manufacturing business.

With the rapid pace of innovation in AI, reducing the end-to-end design and deployment time of cluster-level data center AI systems will be a significant competitive advantage for our customers.

Acquiring ZT Systems is a significant milestone in our AI strategy to deliver leadership training and inferencing solutions that are optimized for our customers’ unique environment, ready-to-deploy at scale, and based on our open ecosystem approach that combines open-source software, industry standard networking technologies and now ZT Systems’ leadership systems design and customer enablement expertise.

We welcome Frank Zhang, Doug Huang and the talented ZT Systems team to AMD, where together we will offer customers both choice and speed to market, allowing them to invest in key areas where they choose to differentiate their AI offerings.

– Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions business unit at AMD

AMD bought ZT Systems, and now they have to sell ZT Systems

Now that AMD’s acquisition is complete, the company has roughly 1,100 more systems engineers at its disposal. With these engineers, AMD plans to use their expertise to deliver a “new class of end-to-end AI solutions based on a combination of AMD CPU, GPU, and networking silicon.” In other words, this acquisition should help AMD accelerate the design and deployment of new AI systems.

At this time, it is unclear what the future holds for ZT Systems’ manufacturing arm. Over time, it will be sold off to those who are interested in ZT’s manufacturing capabilities. That said, it remains unclear who these buyers will be.

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