AMD will pay more than $30 billion to get Xilinx FPGAs. October has been AMD’s month so far. After their hardware presentation, now news indicate that AMD is very close to buying Xilinx. This giant in the manufacture of programmable circuits or FPGAs would give AMD greater access to segments such as telecommunications or data centers, but the operation will not be cheap: it is estimated that AMD could pay more than $30 billion in this acquisition.
- AMD introduced Zen 3 and Ryzen 5000
- RTX A6000 & RTX A40 are NVIDIA’s new professional graphic cards
- Intel launched 500 series chipsets for Rocket Lake-S processors
Why AMD wants Xilinx FPGAs?
The agreement between AMD and Xilinx might be officially announced next week, but rumors indicate that the advanced negotiations are not done. It seems like the negotiation had been abandoned after a first attempt and now they have been reactivated.
AMD’s market value is around $100 billion thanks to an exceptional year. Thanks to the demand for PCs, laptops and new gaming consoles they have grown by 89%. Currently, Xilinx’s market value is about $26 billion, and its growth has been much more modest, 9%.
Xilinx, an American company founded in 1984, is a tempting acquisition for AMD. Xilinx specializes in programmable circuits called FPGAs, a very versatile type of solution that allows much more dynamic prototyping and development phases and is commonly used in segments such as 5G infrastructures or data centers – they are used for example at CERN – but also in industries such as aerospace, automotive or military applications.
Intel is the other major player in the FPGA segment after the acquisition of Altera in 2015 for 16.7 billion dollars, that is why AMD also wants to become a direct rival in this segment. NVIDIA recently acquired ARM for $40 billion. If AMD buys Xilinx, this will be another major transaction in the field of the semiconductor sector.
