AMD has received approval from all necessary authorities to proceed with its acquisition of Xilinx, a vaunted name in the semiconductor industry for such notable achievements as inventing the first commercially-viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and being the semiconductor company that created the first fabless manufacturing model.
Following a 16-month process since AMD announced its intention, this acquisition (worth $54 billion at current valuation) sees the bringing together of two industry leaders with complementary product portfolios and customers, combining CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, adaptive SoCs and deep software expertise, with the aim of leading the market for computing platforms for cloud, edge and intelligent end devices.
The news will have come as a blow to AMD’s arch-rival, Nvidia, which just the day prior announced the termination of its attempt to purchase Arm Ltd. after facing insurmountable hurdles from anti-competition regulators. This despite Nvidia’s attempts to persuade regulators that the deal won't affect Arm’s free licencing model, even after offering to set up a separate entity to hold the chip design licences. In accordance with the terms of the agreement, SoftBank Group, the current owner of Arm, will retain the $1,25 billion prepaid by Nvidia and Nvidia will retain its 20-year Arm licence.
Nvidia’s appetite for growth, whether organic or through acquisition, is unlikely to be diminished by this latest blow, however, having recently surpassed social media behemoth Meta (owner of Facebook and its subsidiaries) and in 2020 becoming larger than AMD and Intel combined in terms of market capitalisation ($313,82 billion versus $306,75 billion).
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