Advanced Micro Devices on Friday announced the completion of its acquisition of server maker Sea Micro, which will be folded into AMD as a new business unit called Data Center Server Solutions.
AMD paid $334 million for SeaMicro, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company which burst on the scene a few years ago with cloud-friendly, high-bandwidth "microservers" built around hundreds of low-power Intel Atom processors and which also owns an innovative data center fabric technology.
"Our unique fabric technology is truly one of the crown jewels of the cloud," said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Global Business Units, in a statement announcing the close of the deal.
"The combination of this innovative technology with our processor design expertise greatly enhances our ability to attack the fastest growing portion of the server market with industry-leading low-power, low-cost, high-bandwidth solutions."
AMD announced its bid to acquire SeaMicro late last month in a surprise move that was seen as undercutting the chip maker's main rival Intel, which was assumed to have an inside track on a deal for the coveted startup due to the Atom connection.
But SeaMicro chief executive Andrew Feldman, who will become general manager of the new Data Center Server Solutions unit at AMD, said last month that SeaMicro's server and data center technology is "processor-agnostic," as AMD promised to release new servers based on its own Opteron chips in the coming months after closing the deal.
"The response to AMD's disruptive server strategy since it was first announced has been overwhelmingly positive," an AMD spokesperson said, referring to industry reaction to the deal's announcement on Feb. 29.
Perhaps, but Intel earlier this month appeared to try to take the wind out its rival's sails when Diane Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center and Connected Systems Group, told reporters that counter to the prevailing narrative, Intel executives "were not impressed with [SeaMicro's] technology" and had not in fact wanted to acquire the company before AMD beat them to the punch.
SeaMicro board member Fred Weber fired back a couple of days after Bryant's remarks, calling the Intel executive's comments "disappointing" and saying, "I think she has gotten a little ahead of herself, truth-wise."