Investing.com — Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) is set to invest $20 million in Absci, a Washington-based drug-discovery firm, aiming to increase the use of its artificial intelligence (AI) chips in the healthcare sector, according to Wall Street Journal.
The investment is structured as a private investment in public equity, which includes an equity stake in Absci, though the exact amount of the stake remains undisclosed by AMD.
The Santa Clara, California-based AMD hopes that this investment and partnership will aid in reducing hardware costs and optimizing AI solutions for Absci. This marks AMD’s inaugural venture into the life sciences sector with its AI chips, a market also pursued by its competitor, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA).
Back in 2023, Nvidia had invested $50 million to enhance Recursion Pharmaceuticals’ AI-based drug-discovery initiatives, also supplying the underlying hardware for the project.
AMD’s chief technology officer, Mark Papermaster, conveyed that their association with Absci is the first in a series of efforts to offer its graphics processing units (GPUs) to specific sectors. For AMD, investing in companies such as Absci is part of its strategy to advance in the GPU market, currently dominated by Nvidia.
In December, AMD had participated in a $333 million financing round for cloud company Vultr, with the goal of becoming the preferred AI hardware provider.
As a result of AMD’s investment, Absci will enhance its usage of AMD’s GPUs, according to the company’s founder and CEO, Sean McClain. Currently, Absci uses over 470 AI chips, the majority of which are Nvidia’s GPUs. The company plans to begin transitioning some of its AI drug discovery workloads to AMD’s GPUs.
McClain explained that AI-based drug discovery requires significant computational power, a challenge that Absci quickly encountered. This is partly why AMD’s partnership and investment were appealing, as they offered a chance to reduce Absci’s costs of inference, or the costs of utilizing AI models.
Absci is also collaborating with AMD to create hardware and software that will better cater to the healthcare sector and AI-based drug discovery. The company, which has approximately 160 employees and has raised a total of about $567 million, intends to use the new funding to continue developing its AI models and to progress its internal drug development efforts.
It anticipates having results from a clinical trial for a drug targeting inflammatory bowel disease in the second half of the year.
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