AMD Nearing Deal To Acquire Xilinx For Over $30 Billion: WSJ

If the chipmaker acquires Xilinx, it would give AMD an arsenal of products to compete with Intel’s reprogrammable chip solutions in the data center, among other markets. ‘We‘re uniquely positioned, unlike most companies in the data center space, the IT solution space, to cover the whole gamut of segments within IT,’ a Xilinx rep told CRN earlier this year.

AMD is reportedly close to reaching a deal to acquire programmable chipmaker Xilinx for more than $30 billion — a move that could give the company another arsenal of products to compete with rivals Intel and Nvidia.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday night that the two companies are in advanced discussions, and a deal could be reached as early as next week. However, the newspaper cautioned, talks could unravel since they have already stalled once.

[Related: The Rumored $30B AMD-Xilinx Acquisition: 5 Big Things To Know]

Both companies did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday.

The report of the deal comes less than a month after AMD’s other rival, Nvidia, announced that it plans to acquire British chip designer Arm for $40 billion.

Xilinx, a San Jose, Calif.-based company founded in 1984, makes reprogrammable chips called field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, that serve as the basis for a variety of products targeting several markets, including telecom, automotive and broadcast. But over the last two years, the company has embraced a strategy that is bringing it deeper into the IT channel than ever before: “data center first.”

The company is pursuing the data center market with a lineup of Alveo accelerator cards, which Xilinx says provide “adaptable” high performance for applications ranging from storage and data analytics to machine learning and streaming video.

“We‘re uniquely positioned, unlike most companies in the data center space, the IT solution space, to cover the whole gamut of segments within IT,” Aaron Behman, director of video product marketing for Xilinx’s Data Center Group, told CRN earlier this year.

If AMD acquired Xilinx— whose market value is $26 billion market value, The Wall Street Journal noted — it would give the chipmaker an arsenal of products to compete with Intel’s FPGA solutions that were gained through the rival’s $16.7 billion acquisition of Altera in 2015. But AMD would also gain another way to compete with Nvidia since Xilinx has positioned its Alveo accelerator cards as worthy competition for Nvidia’s data center GPUs.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based AMD has been making bigger strides in the data center, most recently with its second-generation EPYC processors that have allowed the company to claim double-digit share in the x86 server market against Intel. The company is also planning new data center GPUs based on a new CDNA architecture.

“We feel that customers are very open across cloud, OEM, enterprise. It‘s on us to execute, and we think about that every day,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said in the company’s most recent earnings call. ”But in terms of where the roadmap is, what are we trying to accomplish, where the customers are, there’s a pull from customers to engage us across a number of workloads.”