Amazon To Buy AI Chipmaker Perceive To Boost LLMs At The Edge

Amazon plans to acquire AI chipmaker Perceive for $80 million to boost its LLMs and edge capabilities.

Amazon, parent company of Amazon Web Services, plans to acquire AI chipmaker and model specialist Perceive Corp. for $80 million in cash to boost the company’s large language models and edge computing capabilities.

“We’re excited to have signed a deal to acquire Perceive and bring over its talented team to join our efforts to bring large language models and multimodal experiences to devices capable of running on the edge,” said Amazon in a statement to CRN.

San Jose, Calif.-based Perceive is a subsidiary of publicly traded company Xperi, which has a market capitalization of $402 million.

Perceive provides offerings for serving large AI models on edge devices.

With a focus on edge inference hardware and software technologies, Perceive enables low-power devices such as conferencing systems and wearable devices, some of which use Perceive’s own AI-powered processor, called Ergo.

Ergo brings performance and power efficiency to edge devices with the ability to handle many tasks—from object classification and detection to audio signal processing and language.

AWS’ In-House Silicon

AWS has been building its own in-house custom silicon for AI workloads and cloud optimization for years.

For example, AWS builds its own Graviton processors, Inferentia chips and Trainium machine learning processors for training AI models in the cloud.

From its new Amazon Q Developer and Business products to Amazon Bedrock, AWS’ AI product innovation engine has been on fire in 2024. AWS’ new generative AI products and AI-powered cybersecurity innovation are top of mind for the company’s new CEO, Matt Garman.

“With security as the absolute baseline, the next most critical thing for AWS today is innovating on behalf of our customers in the realm of generative AI,” Garman said earlier this year. “Generative AI is going to disrupt and change almost every industry and customer experience in the world. It’s an area where we have invested heavily and will continue to do so.”

Xperi CEO: Amazon Will Take Perceive Technology ‘To The Next Level’

About 50 Xperi employees focused on Perceive will join Amazon as part of the acquisition.

The Perceive acquisition builds on Amazon’s investments in edge computing technologies and custom silicon, aimed at boosting its efforts in large language models and multimodal experiences.

Jon Kirchner, CEO of Xperi, said the landscape for edge inference technology has evolved, with Perceive adapting to the rapidly changing environment.

“We are pleased to have found a suitable home for Perceive, its employees and its technology,” said Kirchner. “We are excited that Amazon will be able to take the technology to the next level, which we believe has significant potential.”

The deal is expected to close by the end of 2024.