AMD Acquires Pensando

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) announced a definitive agreement to acquire Pensando Systems for approximately $1.9 billion before working capital and other adjustments.

Pensando’s distributed services platform includes a high-performance, programmable packet processor and comprehensive software stack that accelerate networking, security, storage and other services for cloud, enterprise and edge applications.

“To build a data center with the best performance, security, flexibility and lowest TCO requires a wide range of compute engines,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO. “All major cloud and OEM customers have adopted EPYC processors to power their data center offerings. Today, with our acquisition of Pensando, we add a leading distributed services platform to our high-performance CPU, GPU, FPGA and adaptive SoC portfolio. The Pensando team brings world-class expertise and a proven track record of innovation at the chip, software and platform level which expands our ability to offer leadership solutions for our cloud, enterprise and edge customers.”

Pensando’s products are already deployed at scale across cloud and enterprise customers, including Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. Its high-performance, scalable distributed services platform includes a programmable packet processor that can be distributed throughout a network to efficiently accelerate multiple infrastructure services simultaneously, offloading workloads from the CPU, and increasing overall system performance. Combined with firm’s system software stack, the platform offers performance, scale, flexibility and security. In real-world cloud deployments, its solution demonstrates between 8x and 13x greater performance compared to competitive solutions.

“We are excited to join the AMD family. Our shared cultures of innovation, excellence and relentless focus on partners and customers make this an ideal combination. Together, we have the talent and tools to deliver on our customers’ vision for the future of computing,” said Pensando CEO Prem Jain. “In less than 5 years Pensando has assembled a best-in-class engineering team that are experts in building systems together with a rich, deep ecosystem of partners and customers who have currently deployed over 100,000 Pensando platforms into production. Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our core business and enable us to pursue a much larger customer base across more markets.”

“Industry leadership is based on catching business model disruptions enabled by new technologies,” said John Chambers, chair of the board, Pensando. “Pensando is built upon strong customer products and a solution that is at least two years ahead in cloud, edge and enterprise. For example, the performance and scale of Pensando’s distributed services platform is 8x-13x of the largest cloud provider and uses less power. Pensando’s smart switching architecture has 100x the scale, 10x the performance at one-third the cost of ownership of any comparable products in the enterprise market.  Pensando’s leadership position in software-defined cloud, compute, networking, security and storage services as part of the much larger AMD portfolio is in my opinion a perfect fit to shape the data center computing landscape for the next decade.”

CEO Prem Jain and the Pensando team will join AMD as part of the Data Center Solutions Group, led by AMD SVP and GM Forrest Norrod.

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.

The acquisition is expected to close in 2Q22, following satisfaction of customary closing conditions including approval under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976.

Advisors
DBO Partners is acting as financial advisor to AMD and Latham & Watkins LLP is serving as its legal advisor. Centerview Partners is acting as financial advisor to Pensando and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is serving as legal counsel.

“Application security is a key issue for the financial services industry and our clients,” said Josh Matheus, MD, Technology, Goldman Sachs. “Pensando’s east-west security innovation has enabled us to segment our data center network architecture to provide hyper-scale class technology and performance that is unparalleled across the sector.“

“Hewlett Packard Enterprise was an early partner of Pensando because we shared the vision that the world would become far more distributed, and that enterprises would need edge-to-cloud architectures to accelerate their insights and outcomes,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO, HPE. “Together, we brought the cloud experience to the edge with the industry’s first distributed services switch, and we drove innovation across the data center by integrating future-proof Pensando distributed network and security services into our server portfolio and HPE GreenLake cloud services offering. We look forward to accelerating the development of these technologies with our long-standing partner AMD, whom we congratulate on this strategic acquisition.”

“Pensando system’s full stack solution, complete with a P4 programmable processor and hyper scale software has enabled Microsoft Azure to rapidly augment its networking and security services improving performance, latency, and scale,” said Girish Bablani, corporate VP, Microsoft Azure. “We have seen a 40x improvement in overall cloud based connection related performance. Pensando delivered this in less than 12 months. This partnership has enabled a transformational limitless networking shift that will ensure our customers have access to the highest performing products and services they expect from Microsoft Azure.”

“By partnering with Pensando, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has developed an industry leading Software Defined Networking stack, delivering infrastructure features to Oracle Cloud customers, that have the best price to performance characteristics in the cloud industry,” said Clay Magouyrk, EVP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Pensando’s P4 programmable platform enables OCI to continuously innovate and deliver secure and inexpensive network services with high velocity. The ability to rapidly add new features using a programmable hardware platform will help OCI leapfrog its cloud competitors. Pensando’s engineering team, consisting of many industry experts, has collaborated very successfully with OCI engineering, and have operated at times as OCI’s extension team. OCI views Pensando as a key strategic partner in achieving our goal of being the best infrastructure platform in the cloud industry.”

About Pensando Systems
Founded in 2017, it is pioneering distributed computing designed for the New Edge, powering software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services to transform existing architectures into the secure, fast environments demanded by next gen applications.