AMD announced an update to its strategic plan in response to COVID-19 on April 15 and included a substantial donation of corporate hardware to help find the vaccine more quickly.
AMD donates $15 million in hardware for COVID-19
The company has donated approximately $15 million in cloud computing nodes powered by EPYC enterprise processors and Radeon Instinct scalar computing accelerators to find a vaccine for COVID-19.
AMD invites all institutions conducting COVID-19-related research to contact them to gain access to nodes that will assist them in their vaccine research.
Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO, wrote:
“AMD today announced an HPC fund for COVID-19 to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases. The fund will include an initial donation of $15 million in high-performance systems with AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to key research institutions. To facilitate implementation and accelerate the beneficial impact of these grants, we are working with our HPC vendor partners to provide ready-to-use HPC nodes. Research institutions should contact AMD to submit proposals for access to these nodes.”
Other companies have also played their part in the development of a vaccine, including NVIDIA, Amazon, VMWare and even Alibaba, who have donated to the same cause.