Amazon, the parent company of AWS, is close to acquiring AI chipmaker Perceive Corp. in an $80 million all-cash deal. The acquisition is geared towards enhancing the capabilities of Amazon in large language models and edge computing.
In a statement to CRN, Amazon said of the acquisition, "We're excited to have signed a deal to acquire Perceive and welcome its talented team. Their expertise will help us enhance large language models and bring multimodal experiences to devices that operate on the edge."
Perceive, headquartered in San Jose, California, is a subsidiary of Xperi, a publicly traded company worth $402 million. Perceive works on solutions that allow large AI models to run efficiently on edge devices. Their technology, especially the AI-enabled Ergo processor, is built to support edge devices such as conference systems and wearables with low power while executing tasks like object detection, audio processing, and language recognition.
It's been years now since AWS started working on its custom silicon, targeted at AI workloads and optimised for cloud operations. The list includes Graviton processors, Inferentia chips, and Trainium processors—everything in service of training AI models within the cloud.
AWS has rolled out several new AI-driven products in 2024, from Amazon Q Developer to Amazon Business and Amazon Bedrock. With its new CEO, Matt Garman, these innovations demonstrate just how strongly AWS is focussing on generative AI and AI-powered cybersecurity.
"Security remains our top priority, but the next big focus for AWS is innovating with generative AI," Garman said earlier this year. "Generative AI will transform industries and customer experiences globally. We have made significant investments in this area, and we will continue to do so."
This will make some sense in terms of Amazon's continued investment in edge computing and custom silicon to support its large language models and multimodal technology as part of the acquisition, adding roughly 50 employees from Xperi working for Perceive.
According to Jon Kirchner, the CEO of Xperi, the land of edge inference technology is changing fast. The executive was optimistic that Amazon would take Perceive's innovations to another level altogether. "We're pleased to have found a strong partner in Amazon for Perceive and its team," said Kirchner. "We believe Amazon will take this technology to new heights, unlocking its full potential."
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