AMD Acquires AI Infrastructure Firm ZT Systems for $4.9 Billion

American computing giant AMD has completed the acquisition of ZT Systems, a company that provides computer, storage and accelerator solutions for cloud and telecom service providers. Last year, AMD announced its plans to acquire ZT Systems for $4.9 billion.

The move will accelerate the design and deployment of AMD-powered AI infrastructure at scale, optimised for the cloud. AMD indicated that this will facilitate innovative end-to-end AI solutions by integrating AMD CPUs, GPUs, networking, and ROCm software while expediting the deployment of large-scale, cloud-optimised AI infrastructure.

“With ZT Systems, we’re bringing in an incredible team,” said Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, in an interaction with Yahoo Finance. “We’re bringing in over a thousand design engineers who are working hand in hand with our silicon engineers, as well as our customers, and systems engineers,” she added. 

ZT Systems is a key partner to some of the world’s largest firms, such as Microsoft and Meta. Founded in 1994, the company focused on desktop PCs and server message block (SMB) servers, but then transitioned to making data center servers in 2004. 

“This [the acquisition] is all about ensuring that we have all of the pieces, both from a hardware standpoint, and lots of investment in software. And ZT is a critical piece in that supply chain and that value chain to give us the systems knowledge,” added Su. 

Furthermore, AMD announced on Monday that its recently revealed 5th generation AMD EPYC processors are powering Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) E6 Standard shapes. AMD’s hardware will now enable OCI Compute E6 shapes to deliver up to a two-fold increase in cost-to-performance, compared to the previous E5 instance generation. 

In February, AMD announced its fourth quarter results for last year, revealing that its data centre segment revenue grew by 69% year-over-year to $3.9 billion. The company generated $12.6 billion in revenue from the data centre segment for the entire last year.