AMD is in advanced talks to buy Xilinx in a deal which could be worth over $30 billion.

The proposed deal would parallel the 2015 Intel takeover of the FPGA company Altera and is probably for the same reason – to acquire FPGA acceleration technology for its datacentre CPUs.

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.