AMD has closed its $4.9 billion acquisition of ZT Systems, an AI infrastructure systems integrator whose expertise and assets could help AMD deliver something closer to the end-to-end “AI factory” vision that competitor Nvidia has leveraged to build a strong position in the AI market.

AMD CEO Lisa Su this week told Yahoo! Finance that the deal answers growing customer demand for an “end-to-end AI capability - hardware, software, systems - to get AI into practice as soon as possible.”

The timing of the closing meets AMD’s previously stated expectation that the deal would close within the first half of 2025. However, AMD is still in the process of selling off ZT’s data center manufacturing business, part of AMD’s original plan when it announced the ZT deal in August 2024. An AMD statement this week said the company is “actively engaged with multiple potential strategic partners” as it works to sell that business this year.

With the deal closing, former ZT Systems Founder and CEO Frank Zhang is joining AMD as senior vice president of ZT Manufacturing, reporting to Forrest Norrod, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions business unit at AMD, as he leads that divestiture process. Meanwhile, former ZT Systems President Doug Huang joins AMD as senior vice president of Data Center Platform Engineering, also reporting to Norrod. In this role, he will lead design and customer enablement teams, working closely with the AMD Data Center Solutions business unit and AI Group to accelerate time-to-market for data center AI solutions, the company stated.

The closing of the ZT deal came the same week that AMD also announced that its fifth-generation EPYC CPUs were being used in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute E6 Shapes for cloud computing instances. It has been widely observed that the ZT acquisition could strengthen AMD’s case with hyperscalers both on AI and more general-purpose compute opportunities. As Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, told Fierce Electronics last year, ZT could help promote EPYC processors specifically against Intel Xeon “for some very large installations. This is a parallel strategy to the AMD vs Nvidia capabilities in the AI space, and both will provide AMD with increased market leverage.”

Also this week, AMD said that its Instinct MI325X GPU was part of both AMD submissions and partner submissions for the MLPerf Inference 5.0 AI performance benchmark program.

By: DocMemory
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