AMD has acquired MK1, an AI software startup launched by veterans of Elon Musk’s Neuralink, as the chipmaker continues an aggressive acquisition strategy to strengthen its position against Nvidia in the fast growing AI market. The company made the announcement on Monday, saying the deal is aimed at improving AI performance and efficiency across its product ecosystem.
Anush Elangovan, corporate vice president of software development at AMD, said the MK1 team will join the company’s Artificial Intelligence Group. He noted that their expertise will help advance AMD’s high speed inference capabilities and enterprise AI stack. MK1 was founded by Neuralink co-founder Paul Merolla, who previously led chip design and algorithms for decoding brain activity, and Thong Wei Koh, a former team lead at the firm specialising in brain neural signal processing. Other MK1 engineers come from leading technology companies including Meta, Tesla and Apple.
Elangovan said MK1 focuses on high speed inference and reasoning based AI technologies built for large scale deployments running on AMD hardware. The startup currently handles more than one trillion tokens a day. Its Flywheel and comprehension engines take advantage of the memory architecture in AMD’s Instinct GPUs. These accelerators have been gaining ground in the AI infrastructure sector, supported by a major agreement with OpenAI to deploy six gigawatts of Instinct based systems.
According to AMD, combining MK1’s software with Instinct GPUs will help deliver accurate, cost effective and traceable reasoning at scale, which is central to agentic AI workloads. Elangovan said the acquisition will accelerate next generation enterprise AI and help businesses automate complex processes while opening new high value opportunities.
The MK1 acquisition follows AMD’s recent disclosure that it spent thirty six million dollars on smaller deals this year outside of its major four point nine billion dollar purchase of ZT Systems. These transactions included silicon photonics startup Enosemi, compiler startup Brium and technical staff from AI chip startup Untether AI. AMD said these investments will support future AI systems, provide more optimised solutions and strengthen its engineering talent base.
The company announced the latest deal as it reported strong demand for its CPUs in both PC and server markets, along with rising sales of its Instinct data center GPUs. This allowed AMD to post record quarterly revenue of nine point two billion dollars. Over the past several years, AMD has relied heavily on targeted acquisitions to build competitive GPU, system and software capabilities and win enterprise AI customers. The ZT Systems acquisition has helped AMD design rack scale AI solutions and secure major partnerships, including its work with OpenAI.
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