AMD is in advanced talks to buy Xilinx in a deal which could be worth over $30 billion.
Xilinx has been making inroads into the datacentre market with its ACAP (Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform) acceleration hardware which configures servers to suit particular workloads.
Xilinx has a market cap of $26 billion while AMD’s market cap is over $100 billion after its shares have risen 89% this year on the back of pandemic-driven demand for PC and server CPUs. It now has 20% of the PC CPU market.
AMD had sales of $1.93 billion in Q2 and profit of $157 million. Its high share price gives it the wherewithal to make a major acquisition. Xilinx had sales of $3 billion in its FY to the end of March 2020, its shares have risen 9% this year.
It would be the second biggest acquisition of the year after Nvidia’s $40 billion takeover of Arm. The third biggest deal this year was ADI’s $20 billion acquisition of Maxim.