Friday, January 17th 2025
Report: Intel Could Face Acquisition, Units to Remain Together
Multiple sources say an unidentified corporation is exploring the complete acquisition of Intel Corporation, according to tech publication SemiAccurate. The report points to an internal memo shared among a small group of top executives at the unnamed firm. A high-level insider confirmed the memo's legitimacy last week, reinforcing speculation that a purchase of Intel may be under serious consideration. SemiAccurate's report indicates that the prospective buyer has enough financial resources to acquire Intel outright, considering the company's current market valuation. Notably, this potential buyer has not been publicly identified in previous discussions about Intel's future, suggesting that planning has occurred behind closed doors. The memo's limited circulation hints that executives treat the proposal cautiously rather than engaging in casual exploratory talks.
Any attempt to purchase Intel would require extensive regulatory review, given the company's role in producing semiconductors for both commercial and government applications. Regulators would likely evaluate issues related to national security, supply chain stability, and competitive impact in the global chip market. While neither Intel nor the unidentified acquirer has issued an official statement on the rumor, we are watching for any signals of formal negotiations. Intel has long been a strategic source of the US semiconductor sector, and its potential ownership change would have to be domestic. If a deal does materialize, it would stand among the largest transactions in the technology field.
Source:
SemiAccurate
Any attempt to purchase Intel would require extensive regulatory review, given the company's role in producing semiconductors for both commercial and government applications. Regulators would likely evaluate issues related to national security, supply chain stability, and competitive impact in the global chip market. While neither Intel nor the unidentified acquirer has issued an official statement on the rumor, we are watching for any signals of formal negotiations. Intel has long been a strategic source of the US semiconductor sector, and its potential ownership change would have to be domestic. If a deal does materialize, it would stand among the largest transactions in the technology field.
61 Comments on Report: Intel Could Face Acquisition, Units to Remain Together
Then the rest of Intel would be bought up for their other IP, fabs, and talent by whoever else.
That said, while it may not happen, it would be hilarious and interesting if AMD did buy Intel. Then they could run 3-4 teams competing on processor improvements, and combine Altera with Xilinx to further improve their FPGA portfolio further. Then the much-needed manpower from Intel's GPU team can be added to AMD's to improve both the drivers and speed up GPU R&D. The real money pit would be the Fabs; AMD got rid of theirs for that reason, but if the Fabs are part of the package, AMD could theoretically utilize them to continue producing chips designed for IoT that Intel was already doing, and then test porting some of their designs to the Fabs. On the other hand, millions and billions of government contracts.
Broadcom makes the most sens in my mind, they probably could be allowed for the most part.
Or just large financial investors
Nvidia would likely be interested, also because of patents, but also because they want to enter the CPU market. Sadly, any such deal would spell the end of Intel Arc graphics, though.
Microsoft might be interested, due to the whole Wintel deal and their profitable cloud business. Amazon, Google, Cisco and Oracle would also slot in the same vein here.
TSMC's interest in Intel would be primarily due to its foundry business, I see them interested in acquiring Intel Foundry Services, but not the other businesses. Same would apply to Samsung.
AMD is very unlikely to be able to conclude any deal, anti-trust would shoot it down as fast as possible as they would have an universal monopoly on x86. However, they might be interested in IFS to have their own fabs and maximize output for their profitable server business.
Not sure about Tesla or even any other of Elon Musk's businesses, X, XAI, Boring Company, Neuralink, etc. none of these would have any need for Intel's IP or infrastructure
So reducing to actual prospective buyers, I'd be placing Qcom, Nvidia and Apple for the IP portion, AMD, TSMC and Samsung for the foundry services and the cloud companies as prospective buyers for the company as a whole. The government may turn out to be quite protective of Intel IP and scrutiny for the transfer of technology would be quite high, however.
wccftech.com/elon-musk-reportedly-emerges-as-a-potential-intel-buyer/
In hind site, Intel has been treading water for at least 5 years, doing everything they can to make their process perform. That ended with Arrow Lake, or maybe even Raptor Lake. All of a sudden, Intel is out of answers to the competition.
Intel OWNS x86!
You are confusing AMD and VIA with intel. Whomever buys intel buys x86.Not the PC, but servers. Xeons made bonkers bucks compared to the consumer space.
AMD's greatest achievement has not ben the Ryzen CPUs, rather, its been the success of Threadripper and Epyc. Not only have they taken juicy marketshare, but they've forced intel to slash prices to remain competitive, which is eating their margins alive. I remember when AMD hit 3% of the server market and the comapny's revenue DOUBLED.
Without that free flowing money Intel simply cant remain competitive if they hit a rough patch with fabs, which they did half a decade ago and still have not recovered.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
*With physical address extensions, you have about 64 GB of addressing space, which would still serve most types of systems today.
Besides IP, major national security reasons, (in)dependance of foreign tech, economical interests and that kind of stuff.
Whatever will happen with Intel, these things will have significant impact on the outcome.
www.techpowerup.com/327755/what-the-intel-amd-x86-ecosystem-advisory-group-is-and-what-its-not
Whom do Intel and AMD fear? It's not the processor designers that could copy the ISA and make a processor running modern Windows. Not realistically. It's Apple and MS and maybe some other company, who may one day develop seriously well-performing x86 emulators on ARM processors.
Also, x86 is nothing without the AMD 64-bit technology.