Intel Buys Altera In £11bn Chip Deal

Intel has confirmed it will buy chip rival Altera for $16.7bn (£11bn).

Intel will pay $54 a share for Altera as it boosts production of more epxpensive chips made for data centres.

PC market

Intel has made the move after a slow down in PC sales, with the company increasingly looking to expand in mobile devices, servers, and the Internet of Things to drive profit.

“Intel’s growth strategy is to expand our core assets into profitable, complementary market segments,” said Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel.

“With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Moore’s Law to make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more. Whether to enable new growth in the network, large cloud data centres or IoT segments, our customers expect better performance at lower costs. This is the promise of Moore’s Law and it’s the innovation enabled by Intel and Altera joining forces. We look forward to working with the talented team at Altera to deliver this value to our customers and stockholders.”

The deal comes hot on the heels of Avago Technologies buying Broadcom Corp for $37 billion (£24.4bn) last week.

“Given our close partnership, we’ve seen firsthand the many benefits of our relationship with Intel—the world’s largest semiconductor company and a proven technology leader, and look forward to the many opportunities we will have together,” said John Daane, CEO of Altera.

Take our Intel quiz here!