AMD announced the acquisition of Toronto-based AI chip startup Taalas for an undisclosed sum on August 6, 2026. Taalas specializes in etching AI model weights directly into silicon to enhance inference performance, part of AMD's strategy to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware.
AMD announced the acquisition of Toronto-based AI chip startup Taalas for an undisclosed sum on August 6, 2026. Taalas specializes in etching AI model weights directly into silicon to enhance inference performance, part of AMD's strategy to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware.
The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average reached all-time highs on August 4-5, 2026, driven by optimism over potential progress on reopening the Strait of Hormuz and strong corporate earnings. The Nasdaq lagged as SpaceX and AMD shares fell despite positive earnings reports.
The U.S. National Science Foundation announced a new $100 million initiative to establish state and regional AI infrastructure hubs across the country, partnering with NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Dell Technologies to expand access to computing resources for researchers, students, and educators.
AMD reported Q2 revenue up 50% with data center sales more than doubling, but shares declined in extended trading after the company gave an AI growth outlook that disappointed investors expecting stronger returns from AI data center expansion.
The U.S. National Science Foundation announced a new $100 million initiative to establish state and regional AI infrastructure hubs across the country, partnering with NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Dell Technologies to expand access to computing resources for researchers, students, and educators.
VAST Data announced an expanded collaboration with AMD to integrate its AI Operating System with AMD's 6th Gen EPYC CPUs, Instinct GPUs, and Pensando AI NICs, targeting AI cloud providers and enterprises building high-performance AI infrastructure for inference workloads.
AMD unveiled its EPYC 9006 Series server processors at Advancing AI 2026, featuring up to 256 cores and 512 threads across SP7 and SP8 platforms. Major server manufacturers including ASUS, MSI, and Ace Computers announced systems based on the new chips, targeting agentic AI, cloud computing, HPC, and enterprise workloads.
AMD CEO Lisa Su announced that the Helios rack-scale AI infrastructure system was in full production. AMD claims Helios delivers up to 15% more peak theoretical FP4 compute than Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72, based on AMD calculations. The system integrates 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs, 18 EPYC “Venice” CPUs and AMD Pensando networking for large-scale AI training and inference.
Advanced Micro Devices and Anthropic have announced a major partnership involving up to $5 billion in investment and the deployment of up to 2 gigawatts of AMD's upcoming Instinct MI450 series GPUs, marking AMD's largest AI infrastructure deal and a significant challenge to Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market.
World model AI startup Odyssey ML, founded by self-driving vehicle pioneers, secured $310 million in funding at a $1.45 billion valuation. The round was backed by Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, CIA-linked fund IQT, and Google chief scientist Jeff Dean.
Nvidia unveiled the RTX Spark chip for personal computers and partnered with Microsoft to launch the Surface Ultra laptop, marking Nvidia's entry as a complete PC chipmaker competing with Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm.
OpenAI launched Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC), a new open networking protocol developed with AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA to improve GPU networking performance in large-scale AI training infrastructure.
Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms generated $33 million in inaugural data center revenue in Q1 2026 while expanding its AMD partnership with doubled contracted capacity, signaling accelerated pivot to AI infrastructure hosting.
Stella Laurenzo, AMD's AI director, publicly stated that Anthropic's Claude Code has significantly degraded in performance since a February 2026 update, declaring it 'cannot be trusted' for complex engineering tasks based on analysis of nearly 7,000 coding sessions. The criticism comes as Anthropic launches new AI agent products and faces scrutiny after accidentally exposing Claude Code's source code via an npm package.
