No. 9: AMD Completes $49 Billion Xilinx Buy In Semiconductor Industry’s Biggest Acquisition

On February 14, chipmaker AMD completed its acquisition of Xilinx, allowing AMD to expand beyond its core CPU and GPU product lineup to add reprogrammable chips, called field programmable gate arrays, to its technology portfolio.

The acquisition is already paying off: In August, AMD reported that Xilinx revenue accounted for 51 percent of its $6.55 billion in revenue in its second quarter.

Going forward the acquisition is expected to significantly expand AMD’s opportunities in data centers, embedded computing and telecommunications. Xilinx also had a presence in other markets including defense, broadcast and consumer electronics. Altogether the acquisition grew AMD’s total addressable market to $135 billion from $80 billion, according to the company.

The cost of the all-stock acquisition deal was originally $35 billion when it was announced in October 2020. But the double-digit growth of AMD’s share price since then boosted the deal’s final price tag to $49 billion – the largest acquisition deal in the history of the semiconductor industry.

AMD’s successful Xilinx acquisition was in contrast to the failed effort by rival Nvidia to acquire British chip designer Arm for $40 billion. Nvidia abandoned that deal in February in the face of regulatory opposition.

Intel, meanwhile, has taken steps in 2022 to aggressively expand its chip manufacturing capacity, including striking a deal in February to buy Israeli chipmaker Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion. Tower operates a network of chip manufacturing plants that Intel said will significantly advance its plan to manufacture chips for other companies through Intel Foundry Services.