AMD Plans To Acquire This Startup For IDR 27.2 Trillion To Compete With Intel

JAKARTA - AMD has just announced that it will acquire data center optimization startup Pensando for approximately US$1.9 billion or equivalent to Rp27.2 trillion to improve the company's business performance.

This deal will make AMD more competitive in the data center market. Pensando builds chips and software designed to be more efficient with data centers on cloud computing, which AMD products can adopt to compete with Nvidia's Grace superchips.

“To build a leading data center with the best performance, security, flexibility, and lowest total cost of ownership requires a variety of compute engines,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su.

Su added that AMD itself wants to increase its data center chip market share which is less than 1 percent and close the gap with Intel and Nvidia.

"With our acquisition of Pensando, we are adding a leading distributed services platform to our high-performance CPU, GPU, FPGA and adaptive SoC portfolio. The Pensando team delivers world-class expertise and a proven track record of innovation at chip, software and platform levels, which expands our ability to offer leadership solutions to our cloud, enterprise and edge customers."

Launching TechCrunch, Tuesday, April 5, it is known, Pensando products include a package processor that can be programmed and can manage how workloads move through the hardware infrastructure, moving work off the CPU whenever possible to improve performance.

The company claims between 8x and 13x better performance than competitive products from companies like Nutanix, VMware, Cisco, and others.

“Joining AMD will help accelerate the growth of our core business and allow us to pursue a much larger customer base in more markets,” said Pensando CEO and co-founder, Prem Jain. He will later join the data center solutions group at AMD. when the deal closes.

For information, Pensando was launched in 2017 and has raised more than $300 million from companies such as Lightspeed Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, according to Crunchbase data. Their customers also include Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud and Goldman Sachs.

Finally, AMD said the price of IDR 27.2 trillion would still change, and the exact price of this deal would be determined when they had received details of working capital and other adjustments from Pensando. Nonetheless, the deal is expected to be finalized in the second quarter, subject to the company's regulatory review.