The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that Advanced Micro Devices said Wednesday that it will pay about $2.9-billion (U.S.) for Toronto-based semiconductor start-up Taalas Inc., making it one of the largest takeovers of a Canadian technology company. The Globe's Murad Hemmadi writes that AMD, of Santa Clara, Calif., announced the deal in August, and in a securities filing Wednesday it disclosed the price of the cash-and-stock acquisition. It said $1.4-billion of the purchase amount is conditional. The deal has yet to close. AMD's acquisition of Taalas is the largest known transaction involving a Canadian technology company since Ecolab Inc. of St. Paul, Minn., agreed to acquire Calgary's CoolIT Systems, which makes data-centre cooling equipment, for $4.75-billion (U.S.) in March. Former long-time AMD executives Ljubisa and Lejla Bajic and Drago Ignjatovic co-founded Taalas in August, 2023. The start-up set out to meet the growing demand for chips to run large language models nd the generative tools they power. Taalas bet it could develop faster and more energy-efficient semiconductors by designing its hardware for specific AI systems. Its first chip was tailored to Meta Platform's Llama family of LLMs.