AMD acquires Pensando

AMD has completed its acquisition of Pensando Systems in a transaction valued at approximately $1.9 billion. Pensando’s distributed services platform will expand AMD’s data center product portfolio with a high-performance data processing unit (DPU) and software stack that are already deployed at scale across cloud and enterprise customers including Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. The Pensando team will join the AMD Data Center Solutions Group, led by AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager Forrest Norrod

“The data center remains one of the largest growth opportunities for AMD. The addition of the Pensando Systems team with their hardware and software portfolio will enables us to offer cloud, enterprise and edge customers a broader portfolio of leadership compute engines that can be optimized for their specific workloads,” said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. “Pensando’s leadership DPU complements our data center product portfolio, enabling AMD to offer solutions that can significantly accelerate data transfer speeds while providing additional levels of security and analytics that will play a larger role in defining the performance of next-generation data centers.”

Founded in 2017, by a team of ex-Cisco Systems engineers, Pensando CEO Prem Jain is pioneering distributed computing designed for the New Edge – powering software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services to transform existing architectures into the secure, ultra-fast environments demanded by next generation applications. it has deployed over 100,000 of its compute platforms since the company started less than five years ago. The Pensando platform, a first of its kind, was developed in collaboration with the world’s largest cloud, enterprise, storage, and telecommunications leaders and is supported by partnerships with HPE, Oracle, NetApp, Equinix, and multiple Fortune 500 customers including Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.

Data center upgrades are happening en masse right now, and it’s a total land grab for the semiconductor industry. AMD’s latest move gets it some new chips, as well as a play on enterprise-grade cloud software.The Pensando platform is based on a customizable processor and accompanying software stack for computing closer to the source of data creation and the end-user. Pensando helps its customers create an entirely new infrastructure, one that can be customized to their specific application needs.

Pensando will remain focused on executing their product and technology roadmaps, now with additional scale to accelerate their business and address growing market opportunities across a broader number of customers.