AMD to Acquire Hyperscale Solutions Provider ZT Systems For $4.9 Billion

AMD announced this morning that it was acquiring ZT Systems, a leading supplier of hyperscale server solutions for cloud computing and AI for $4.9 billion. The company based in New Jersey will be joining the AMD Data Center Solutions Business Group once the transaction closes in the first half of 2025, and AMD plans to leverage its experience in deploying data center AI compute and storage infrastructure to expand its AI system capabilities.

“Our acquisition of ZT Systems is the next major step in our long-term AI strategy to deliver leadership training and inferencing solutions that can be rapidly deployed at scale across cloud and enterprise customers,” said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. “ZT adds world-class systems design and rack-scale solutions expertise that will significantly strengthen our data center AI systems and customer enablement capabilities. This acquisition also builds on the investments we have made to accelerate our AI hardware and software roadmaps.

This $4.9 billion deal is far from being the biggest acquisition in AMD’s history. Back in 2022, the company acquired semiconductor company Xilinx for approximately $50 billion. In 2006, AMD also acquired GPY maker ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion.

AMD said that this acquisition of ZT Systems follows a previous investment of more than $1 billion to “expand the AMD AI ecosystem and strengthen the company’s AI software capabilities.” AMD has been riding the AI wave with its latest Ryzen CPUs, EPYC processor-based servers, and Instinct GPU accelerators, but the company is facing serious competition from Nvidia in data center offerings. However, AMD also announced today that it will be looking for a “strategic partner” to acquire  ZT Systems’ U.S.-based data center infrastructure manufacturing business.