Another chip company for sale!

Amazon announced that it will acquire chipmaker and artificial intelligence (AI) model compression company Perceive, a subsidiary of publicly traded Xperi in San Jose, California, for $80 million in cash. At the same time, most of Perceive's 44 employees are expected to join Amazon once the transaction is completed.

Perceive specializes in technology for serving large AI models on edge devices, hardware that typically runs at the edge of the network with limited power, processing, connectivity, and storage.

Amazon's AWS division has been developing custom chips for cloud computing and AI workloads separately for years, thanks to the acquisition of Annapurna Labs a decade ago. But Perceive will be integrated into Amazon's devices and services division, which also includes the Alexa voice assistant, Fire TV and Echo smart systems. The division has been led by former Microsoft executive Panos Panay since last fall.

“We are excited to have signed an agreement to acquire Perceive and bring its talented team into our work to bring large language models and multimodal experiences to devices running at the Edge,” Amazon said in a statement.

“The landscape of edge inference technology has been evolving since Perceive’s founding, and Perceive, with the skills of its leaders and engineers, has adapted to this rapidly changing environment,” said Jon Kirchner, CEO of Xperi. “We are pleased to have found the right home for Perceive, its employees, and its technology. We are excited for Amazon to take this technology to the next level and believe it has tremendous potential.”

The deal is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to customary closing conditions. However, Amazon said it does not expect the transaction to require regulatory approval, calling it a routine acquisition.