Intel flogs off majority stake in Altera to Silver Lake • The Register

A decade after gobbling up Altera, Intel is loosening its grip. On Monday, the x86 big stated it is flogging a 51 p.c stake within the FPGA slinger to personal fairness agency Silver Lake.

The deal, which values Altera at $8.75 billion, is predicted to usher in $4.46 billion in money when it closes within the second half of this yr. Whereas in no way a small chunk of change, it is nowhere close to the $16.7 billion Intel paid for Altera, a Subject Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) designer, again in 2015.

In an announcement on Monday, Intel boasted that the deal will set up Altera because the “largest pure-play FPGA” vendor on the planet — although that is solely as a result of its a lot bigger rival Xilinx occurs to be owned by AMD lately.

FPGA are deployed in all types of issues, from telecoms gear and monetary buying and selling techniques, to reborn retro gaming consoles. In addition they play a key function in chip design, the place they’re used to prototype {hardware} for testing and validation earlier than taping out.

These gadgets are prized for his or her flexibility as they are often reconfigured by engineers to carry out quite a lot of duties, together with glue logic, peripheral management, in-line information processing, and different functions the place volumes are inadequate to justify the event and manufacturing of devoted ASICs. An FPGA will be programmed to behave as a community swap, or an IO controller, or a picture processor, or no matter it must be for a specific {hardware} utility.

Silver Lake’s majority stake in Altera had been rumored since February, and comes as newly minted CEO Lip-Bu Tan appears to staunch Intel’s bleeding amid huge losses over the previous yr. In 2024, Intel reported $18.8 billion in web losses and $53.1 billion in income.

Whereas Altera accounted for less than a fraction of that, with an working lack of $615 million in 2024 on revenues of $1.54 billion, Intel had been laying the groundwork to spin off a large chunk of its FPGA biz for a while.

In late 2023, Intel announced plans to hive off its Platform Options Group, which oversaw FPGA design and manufacturing, into an unbiased firm (later dubbed Altera in a reprise of the acquired model). Former Datacenter and AI group chief Sandra Rivera was tapped to steer the trouble, with an eventual IPO on the horizon.

It appears Rivera’s time at Altera has already come to an in depth. The previous President of Merchandise and Applied sciences at Marvell, Raghib Hussain, is about to take her place early subsequent month. Hussain beforehand held roles at Cavium, Cisco, and Cadence. Notably, he handed by means of Cadence lengthy earlier than Tan took the reins there.

“At present’s announcement displays our dedication to sharpening our focus, decreasing our expense construction and strengthening our stability sheet,” Tan stated in a canned assertion.

Intel could also be giving up majority management over Altera, however Tan nonetheless has a seat on the desk for now. The chipmaker will retain a 49 p.c stake in Altera transferring ahead.

The x86 big has but to say whether or not it’s open to promoting off further shares of Altera sooner or later. We have requested for additional remark and can let you realize what we discover out. ®