AMD To Donate $15M Worth Of Computing Systems To Accelerate COVID-19 Medical Research

Joining scores of companies that have contributed toward combating the COVID-19 pandemic, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. AMD announced a contribution in kind.

AMD announced a COVID-19 HPC fund to supply high-performance computing, or HPC, systems to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases, CEO Lisa Su said in an open letter.

Through the fund, the company plans to make an initial donation of $15 million worth of HPC systems powered by its EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to key research institutions.

AMD said it's working with its HPC system provider partners to provide ready-to-install HPC nodes in order to expedite the availability.

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Su also noted that AMD joined the COVID-19 High Performance Consortium set under the auspices of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The consortium is a public-private effort under which the government, industry and university leaders would volunteer free compute time and resources on world class supercomputers to help fight the pandemic.

This apart, AMD said it's contributing more than $1 million to charities and foundations, and providing an additional $1 million through a 2:1 employee gift matching for specific organizations providing COVID-19 humanitarian relief efforts. Additionally, the company has secured and donated hundreds of thousands of masks to medical professionals.

AMD is also prioritizing and expediting product shipments such as AMD embedded processors used in ventilators and respirators, to medical customers, Su said in the letter.