The US semiconductor manufacturer Qualcomm has its eye on Alphawave and announced on Tuesday that it is considering an offer for the British chip designer. However, a decision has not yet been made. The company did not provide any further details. Alphawave could not initially be reached for comment on this topic.
Shortly beforehand, insiders had told the Reuters news agency that Arm had also put out feelers for Alphawave. However, the talks had come to nothing. Neither Alphawave, Arm nor its major shareholder SoftBank wanted to comment on the matter. The chip designer's shares rose by almost 53 percent at times in London, heading for the biggest daily gain in the company's history. Qualcomm shares, on the other hand, fell a good one percent on Wall Street.
Arm was particularly interested in the "SerDes" ("Serializer-Deserializer") technology, insiders added. It enables information to be passed through a chip particularly quickly. This is crucial for computationally intensive applications for artificial intelligence (AI), as vast amounts of data have to be processed simultaneously. Arm wants to significantly expand its market share in central processors for this area of application.
One user of the "SerDes" technology developed by Alphawave is Broadcom. As a result, the Qualcomm rival has acquired the ChatGPT developer and Alphabet subsidiary Google, among others, as customers for its AI chips.
(Reuters)
https://www.cash.ch/news/top-news/qualcomm-zeigt-interesse-an-chip-designer-alphawave-810789
