"Advanced Micro Devices is investing $20 million in Absci, a drug-discovery company based in Washington state, in a move aimed at selling its artificial-intelligence chips in the healthcare sector.
The deal is structured as a private investment in a public equity and includes an equity stake in Absci. AMD didn't disclose the amount of its stake.
AMD, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., said the investment and partnership between the two companies will help reduce hardware costs and optimize AI solutions for Absci.
The move is AMD's first attempt to gain footing in life sciences with its AI chips, a space also targeted by its rival Nvidia. In 2023, Nvidia invested $50 million to boost Recursion Pharmaceuticals' AI-based drug-discovery efforts and provided the underlying hardware for that work.
Mark Papermaster, AMD's chief technology officer, said its relationship with Absci is the first of many efforts to make its graphics processing units, or GPUs, available to certain industries.
"We're now expanding our focus into vertical markets and prioritizing healthcare, where we can immediately have an impact on society," Papermaster said.
For AMD, investments in companies, including Absci, are a part of how it aims to make headway in the GPU market, which is dominated by Nvidia. AMD in December said it was part of a $333 million financing round for cloud company Vultr, for which it aims to become the "preferred" AI hardware provider.
As part of AMD's investment in Absci, the company will move toward greater use of AMD's GPUs, said the company's founder and Chief Executive Sean McClain. Absci currently uses over 470 AI chips, most of which are Nvidia's GPUs. It will start shifting some of its AI drug discovery workloads to AMD's GPUs, he said.
Drug-discovery efforts using AI require immense amounts of computational power -- a constraint that Absci quickly ran up against, according to McClain. That is partly why AMD's partnership and investment were attractive, he said: because it presented an opportunity to lower Absci's costs of inference, or the costs of using AI models.
"We're starting to see this big shift from designing drugs in the wet lab to now designing drugs on AI, and that means compute is extremely important. Our compute spend has skyrocketed," McClain said.
Absci is also working with AMD to develop hardware and software that will better serve the healthcare sector and AI-based drug discovery work, he added.
The company has about 160 employees and has now raised a total of about $567 million. Absci said it plans to use the new funding to continue building its AI models and to keep working on its internal drug-development efforts. Starting in the second half of the year, it said it would have results from a clinical trial for a drug targeting inflammatory bowel disease." [1]
1. AMD Backs Drug-Discovery Firm Absci in Push to Sell Its AI Chips. Lin, Belle. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 Jan 2025: B6
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