The American manufacturer of computer chips AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) announced on Tuesday the acquisition of the Californian company Xilinx for 35 billion dollars in shares.
An operation that allows it to grow its data center activity.
This transaction strengthens AMD against its competitor Intel and creates a new entity worth around 135 billion dollars, details a press release.
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The chip sector is currently in turmoil as groups like Google, Amazon (AWS), Microsoft or Samsung, at the forefront of artificial intelligence, are looking for products that will increase the efficiency of their data centers in specific tasks.
Nvidia, the American manufacturer of graphics processors, thus broke its tire-lire in September, spending up to $ 40 billion to seize the British company Arm, producer of 95% of the microprocessors of mobile phones and tablets in the world.
The American semiconductor maker Analog Devices (ADI) also announced in July that it wanted to get its hands on its competitor Maxim Integrated for $ 21 billion.
Together, AMD and Xilinx "will
capitalize on the opportunities emerging from the industry's most important growth segments, from data centers to gaming, personal computers, communications, automotive, industrial, aerospace and defense,
”said the press release.
Xilinx stock leaps
A marriage with Xilinx, founded in 1984, allows it to become an important player in the niche of programmable processors (FPGA, Field-Programmable Gate Array).
Xilinx has in particular adaptive computing systems to meet the infrastructure requirements of 5G technology.
The group also owns an adaptive computing platform called Versal, which is based on the idea that acceleration hardware and software can change with workloads for data centers, automotive, industries. wired and defense for example.
The new group will have a total of 13,000 engineers and will spend more than $ 2.7 billion per year on research and development, which will allow it "
to provide an even stronger product offering and specific solutions
."
He estimates that he can save $ 300 million per year after 18 months.
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The transaction, validated by the boards of directors of the two groups, has yet to receive the green light from the competition authorities.
It should be finalized by the end of 2021. On Wall Street, the action of Xilinx took 10% in electronic exchanges before the opening of the Stock Exchange while that of AMD dropped 4%.