AMD confirms rumors of a proposed Xilinx acquisition. The chip manufacturer is spending around 35 billion US dollars, the world’s largest provider of programmable logic chips (Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGAs). That corresponds to the equivalent of just under 30 billion euros. If shareholders and authorities agree, both companies want to complete the transaction by the end of 2021.

The AMD lifts costs with the help of the high company valuation on the stock exchange (for comparison: AMD generates only a fraction of the profit of its main competitor Intel, is on the stock exchange with more than 80 billion Euros but worth about half as much). Xilinx ‘shareholders are paid with AMD shares: for every Xilinx share they receive 1, 7234 AMD shares. The valuation is therefore around 143 US dollars or 121 euros per Xilinx share.

Existing AMD shareholders will own 74 percent of the combined company; Xilinx shareholders receive 26 percent. Lisa Su will remain as CEO, the previous Xilinx CEO Victor Peng will head the FPGA division.

New business areas With the takeover, AMD is expanding its own field of business: Xilinx is developing programmable logic chips for 5G base stations, self-driving cars, AI accelerators, space travel and the US arms industry, among other things. For AMD, AI chips, FPGA accelerator cards and the upcoming Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platforms (ACAPs) should be of particular interest in order to get the S