In this technical talk, we discuss how compiler support for sparse tensor computations was added to MLIR (LLVM’s extensible infrastructure for building domain specific compilers). We discuss the concept of sparse tensor types as first class citizens and show how this simplifies the introduction of new front-ends and back-ends for systems that want to add sparse tensor support. We also show how MLIR can be used for rapid sparse library development, driven by either exhaustively searching for suitable sparse storage formats or using ML to find such formats quicker, or even for end-to-end solutions mapping sparse agnostic specification of kernels to efficient sparse code at runtime. Finally, we discuss how you can contribute to this new sparse tensor support in MLIR.