Intel, Monday confirmed that it has agreed to buy smaller rival Altera for about $16.7 billion. Upon the closure of the transaction, Altera will become an Intel business unit which will facilitate the continuity of existing and new customer sales and support with Intel continuing to provide support and development for Altera’s ARM-based and power management product lines.
According to both companies, the acquisition will couple Intel’s leading-edge products and manufacturing process with Altera’s leading field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The combination is expected to enable new classes of products that meet customer needs in the data center and Internet-of-Things (IoT) market segments with Intel stating its plan to offer Altera’s FPGA products with Intel Xeon® processors as highly customized, integrated products.
The companies also expect to enhance Altera’s products through design and manufacturing improvements resulting from Intel’s integrated device manufacturing model.
Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel
Intel’s growth strategy is to expand our core assets into profitable, complementary market segments. With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Moore’s Law to make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more. Whether to enable new growth in the network, large cloud data centers or IoT segments, our customers expect better performance at lower costs. This is the promise of Moore’s Law and it’s the innovation enabled by Intel and Altera joining forces.
John Daane, President, CEO and Chairman of Altera
Given our close partnership, we’ve seen firsthand the many benefits of our relationship with Intel — the world’s largest semiconductor company and a proven technology leader, and look forward to the many opportunities we will have together. We believe that as part of Intel we will be able to develop innovative FPGAs and system-on-chips for our customers in all market segments.
