The acquisition of Xilinx propels AMD past Intel for the first time ever. The future looks bright for team red with more growth on the horizon.
For the first time in AMD’s history, it exceeds Intel in market value, $197.75 billion versus $197.24 billion. That sudden turnaround is due to the acquisition of Xilinx. Xilinx is the inventor of the Field Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA. An FPGA is a chip whose circuitry you can reconfigure via firmware.
AMD plunked down $35 billion for Xilinx. With Xilinx under its wing, AMD significantly strengthens its position against competitors Intel and Nvidia. After all, AMD now builds processors, GPUs and, thanks to Xilinx, everything in between. Nvidia wanted to expand its business to also address the full breadth of the market, but that company’s (even larger) acquisition of Arm came to nothing after protests from competition authorities worldwide.
AMD’s market value could climb considerably higher in the coming months and years. Xilinx is a healthy company that posted record revenue of $1 billion in its most recent quarterly results, up 26 percent year-on-year.
Finally, there is the growing chip industry as a whole. Despite the global chip shortage, chip sales rose a whopping 26 percent in 2021 to an all-time high.