AMD purchases Pensando for $1.9 billion

AMD announced in a press release that it has purchased Pensando — a maker of data center hardware and software — for a purchase price of approximately $1.9 billion US dollars.

Following the acquisition of Xilinx and the announcement of a $8 billion share repurchase program in February. Pensando, created in 2017 by four former Cisco employees, principally delivered Distributed Services Cards, which offload servers in the areas of network, storage, and security services onto PCI Express cards with ARM CPUs. Intel and Nvidia have been supplying similar products for a long time, so AMD likely saw this as an opportunity to catch up. Pensando's portfolio includes software in the cloud, computation, networking, storage, and security, in addition to hardware. Pesando and his more than 300 staff will be integrated into AMD's Data Center Solutions Group, which is overseen by AMD senior vice president and general manager Forrest Norrod.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 26, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced that it 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.”

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.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 26, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced that it 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.”

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.