AMD has completed its acquisition of hyperscale server maker ZT Systems for $4.9 billion, on top of a $1bn investment the chip company previously made.

ZT's US-based data center infrastructure manufacturing business is expected to be sold off this year, with AMD saying that it is in talks with 'multiple potential strategic partners.'

The company currently designs, integrates, manufactures, and deploys servers for companies like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, leading to a rumored $10bn in annual revenue and hundreds of thousands of servers delivered annually.

The new subsidiary will join the AMD Data Center Solutions business unit led by AMD executive vice president Forrest Norrod.

“With the rapid pace of innovation in AI, reducing the end-to-end design and deployment time of cluster-level data center AI systems will be a significant competitive advantage for our customers,” said Norrod.

"Acquiring ZT Systems is a significant milestone in our AI strategy to deliver leadership training and inferencing solutions that are optimized for our customers’ unique environment, ready-to-deploy at scale, and based on our open ecosystem approach that combines open-source software, industry standard networking technologies and now ZT Systems’ leadership systems design and customer enablement expertise."

Former ZT Systems president Doug Huang will become senior vice president of Data Center Platform Engineering, reporting to Norrod.

ZT Systems founder and former CEO Frank Zhang will become the SVP of ZT Manufacturing, helping lead the divestiture of the manufacturing business.

With the deal, AMD plans to offer end-to-end AI solutions utilizing a combination of AMD hardware, from CPUs and GPUs to networking silicon.