companies

Silo AI

Helsinki-founded AI lab, once Europe's largest private AI lab, acquired by AMD in 2024, known for open Nordic-language LLMs Poro and Viking.

Silo AI was founded in Helsinki in 2017 by Peter Sarlin along with five co-founders, and grew into what was widely described as Europe's largest private AI lab, building custom AI systems for enterprise clients including Allianz, Philips, Rolls-Royce and Unilever while also running its own open research. Its best-known public work is a pair of open-weight, multilingual large language models: Poro, and its successor Viking, developed with the University of Turku's TurkuNLP group and trained on the LUMI supercomputer to cover Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, English and programming languages — a gap no major US or Chinese lab had prioritized. In July 2024, AMD announced an agreement to acquire Silo AI for approximately $665 million in an all-cash deal, at the time the largest AI acquisition in Europe, completing the transaction that August. Under AMD, the roughly 300-person team continues developing open Nordic-language models and operates the SiloGen platform, now folded into AMD's broader Enterprise AI Suite for customers deploying models on AMD hardware. Sarlin has since moved on to found a new quantum-AI venture, though Silo AI continues operating as AMD's in-house AI lab.

Founded

2017

Headquarters

Helsinki, Finland

Sector

lab