Intel sells 51% stake in Altera to private equity firm on a $8.75B valuation

Posted by voxadam 5 days ago

Intel sells 51% stake in Altera to private equity firm on a $8.75B valuation(newsroom.intel.com)

314 points | 231 commentspage 2

rsp1984 5 days ago|

Should change title. They sold 51% at a valuation of $8.75B, so cash in is ~ $4.29B.

voxadam 5 days ago||

I've updated the title as best as I could within the constraints of the max length.

mmmBacon 5 days ago||

When Intel acquired Altera, Altera’s market share was at 36% and Xilinx at 51%. Today Xilinx remains at ~50% while Altera’s share has dropped to 29%. Altera has lost share to Microchip and Lattice.

I’ve said it before, Intel is where technology companies go to die. Fortunately while Altera is probably a mess of useless Intel drone MBAs, there’s a decent core that can be salvaged. Best of luck to them.

flanfly 5 days ago||

Props to Intel duping AMD to buy Xillix for whooping $50B

Panzer04 5 days ago|

AMD bought an overpriced company with their own overpriced stock. Probably not as bad as it might look.

bjourne 5 days ago||

Apparently, the FPGA industry wasn't large enough for two major players. Maintaining an extremely specialized developer ecosystem for a relatively small niche can't have been cheap. Almost zero cross-over too, since FPGA tooling is much too foreign to be repurposed for other architectures. I suspect this move will make it a bit harder for Intel to collect "developer mindshare" for their other hyped up stuff because no one likes having the rug pulled out from under them. Hope AMD can make a better job with Xilinx than what Intel could with Altera.

rasz 5 days ago|

Intel FPGA venture made tons more sense than AMD following it. FPGAs are great at filling up your idle fabs and honing engineering skills on reaching high yields.

Selling now also makes sense. There was only one serious competitor in 2015. Now you got Tariffs both ways to the main place where everything is build, and said place has own homegrown vendors like GOWIN, Sipeed, Efinix. But the biggest reason is amount of stuff designed in the West/Taiwan is falling with China taking over actual product design.

https://itif.org/publications/2024/08/19/how-innovative-is-c...

>In 2015, China released its “Made in China 2025” (MIC 2025) strategy, which refined some of these targets, setting a goal of achieving 40 percent self-sufficiency in semiconductors by 2020 and 70 percent by 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

>In 2024, the majority of MIC 2025's goals were considered to be achieved, despite U.S. efforts to curb the program.

Products coming out of China no longer use STM microcontrollers, Vishay/Analog mosfets/diodes and Altera/Xilinx FPGAs. Its all Chinese semiconductor brands you never heard about. Good example is this teardown of Deye SUN-5K-SG04LP1 5kW hybrid solar inverter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0_cTg36A2Q

bjourne 4 days ago||

Intel was looking to sell Altera for over a year before Trump's Tariff Tourettes. And I bet it wasn't the hardware that was the problem, it was the software. No matter how amazing your FPGA hardware is, it is useless if you can't also produce high-quality software for operating it. For CPUs you can just tell people to use gcc or clang, not so with FPGAs.

Alupis 5 days ago||

I wonder if we'll see more Intel sell-offs, as Tan et al try to get things under control.

Will we see an AMD-esque fab spin-off?

DebtDeflation 4 days ago||

Beyond ensuring adequate cash flow, they need to be 100% focused on getting 18A shipping in volume as soon as possible rather than financial engineering stuff.

nxobject 5 days ago|||

Would market regulators allow a single buyer to acquire all of Intel's fabs in one go?

Alupis 5 days ago||

My guess would be no, but I could be wrong. The current administration clearly wants more domestic capability, so even if someone like TSMC/Samsung/etc wanted to acquire as part of their US operations, my gut says it would be challenged.

When AMD spun off their fabs into what became Global Foundries, it was difficult for many to see the upside. However, today, it seems not being tied to any particular fab/tech is one of AMD's biggest advantages.

jsight 5 days ago||

I'd guess that they'll continue to sell off mobileye over time.

MangoCoffee 5 days ago||

What a waste! I can never understand corporate thinking and how CEOs get such massive fucking pay for decisions like this.

Intel paid $16.7 billion in 2015 and sold it for $8.75 billion?! What about all the money dumped into Altera from 2015 to 2025? How much was that? Is Intel just handing over the FPGA market to AMD?

petermcneeley 5 days ago||

Right but they are only selling 51% of it.

https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2021/archive/2015-12-28-...

throwaway2037 5 days ago||

    > Is Intel just handing over the FPGA market to AMD?

Maybe? But who cares. From all of the comments above, I learned that the FPGA market is stalled or shrinking. Even AMD likely overpaid for Xilinx.

sandworm101 5 days ago||

I cannot help myself. My brain parks "Altera" right beside the Weyland and Jupiter Mining corps.

https://subnautica.fandom.com/wiki/Alterra_Corporation

ein0p 5 days ago||

That whole acquisition always was a head-scratcher to me. OK, you pay nearly 17B for the thing, and then do absolutely nothing with it. How does that work? Even during its best years 17B was big money for Intel.

philipov 4 days ago|

I'm not surprised by this divestiture - Investor confidence in Alterra has been low ever since the disastrous loss of their brand new capital ship Aurora on its very first mission.

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