AMD to buy ZT Systems in $4.9bn deal

Advanced Micro Devices said on Monday that it has agreed to buy AI infrastructure provider ZT Systems in a $4.9bn cash and share deal.

The price includes a contingent payment of up to $400m based on certain post-closing milestones.

Once the deal closes, ZT Systems will join the AMD Data Center Solutions Business Group. ZT chief executive Frank Zhang will lead the manufacturing business and ZT president Doug Huang will lead the design and customer enablement teams, both reporting to AMD executive vice president and general manager Forrest Norrod.

AMD said it will seek a strategic partner to buy ZT Systems’ US-based data centre infrastructure manufacturing business.

The company’s chair and chief executive Dr Lisa Su said: "Our acquisition of ZT Systems is the next major step in our long-term strategy to deliver leadership training and inferencing solutions that can be rapidly deployed at scale across cloud and enterprise customers.

"ZT adds world-class systems design and rack-scale solutions expertise that will significantly strengthen our data centre AI systems and customer enablement capabilities. This acquisition also builds on the investments we have made to accelerate our AI hardware and software roadmaps. Combining our high-performance Instinct AI accelerator, EPYC CPU, and networking product portfolios with ZT Systems’ industry-leading data center systems expertise will enable AMD to deliver end-to-end data centre AI infrastructure at scale with our ecosystem of OEM and ODM partners."

Headquartered in New Jersey, ZT Systems has more than 15 years of experience designing and deploying data centre AI compute and storage infrastructure at scale for the largest global cloud companies.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of next year.