Intel sold control of Altera last year. Now the programmable-chip company is heading back toward the public market just as AI gives investors a new reason to care about FPGAs.
Altera said on September 15 that it confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. Reuters previously reported that the offering could raise more than $2 billion. Silver Lake owns 51% after investing $4.46 billion for control, while Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) retains 49%.
Intel Corp.’s headquarters, the Robert Noyce Building in Santa Clara, California. Photo from Intel Corp website
The most useful strategic comparison is Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD), which bought FPGA leader Xilinx in 2022 and integrated programmable silicon into a much broader data-center portfolio.
The IPO could put a price on an asset Intel partially kept
Intel bought Altera for $16.7 billion in 2015 before separating the business and selling control to Silver Lake. An IPO would create a new market valuation for Intel Corporation’s (NASDAQ:INTC) remaining interest.
That matters because Intel needs capital. Its foundry expansion requires enormous spending while the company is still trying to restore competitiveness in conventional CPUs and advanced manufacturing. A strong Altera valuation could therefore crystallize value in an asset investors currently bury inside Intel’s much larger turnaround.
The downside is that IPO appetite for anything carrying an AI label can run ahead of operating reality. Altera makes programmable chips across industrial, communications, aerospace and data-center markets. Management has projected mid-20% revenue growth in 2026, but investors will still have to determine how much of that growth is genuinely AI-driven.
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) shows what Altera ultimately has to compete against. Xilinx gave AMD FPGAs, adaptive SoCs and software that can sit beside its EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators. That bundle can be attractive in heterogeneous systems. The bear case is that AMD paid heavily to assemble that portfolio, and integrating multiple product families does not guarantee every FPGA workload migrates into AMD’s ecosystem.
Funds became much more interested in both chipmakers
Insider Monkey counted 138 hedge funds holding Intel in Q2, up from 112 in Q1. AQR Capital Management held about 10.7 million shares after trimming its stake roughly 7%. AMD ownership jumped to 164 funds from 134, while Marshall Wace held about 3.9 million shares after a modest increase.
Intel had approximately 152.2 million shares sold short on August 31, about 3% of public float.