Intel Corp. is holding discussions with investors about selling a stake in its Altera chip unit, CNBC reported today.

The company is said to have reached out to several potential buyers, including private equity firms, since the start of the week. Intel reportedly hopes to sell a minority stake in Altera for several billion dollars. The deal would value the business at around $17 billion, or about what the chipmaker spent to buy it in 2015. 

The report aligns with recent statements from Sandra Rivera, Altera’s chief executive officer. Last month, she disclosed that Intel hopes to sell a stake in the business and then take it public in 2026. Rivera detailed the plan following the emergence of reports that Intel may sell Altera outright, which the executive ruled out.

According to CNBC, Intel has told some of the investors it approached this week that it could be open to selling a majority stake in Altera. The report didn’t specify how such a deal, if it happens, might change the company’s plans to take the unit public.

Altera is a major supplier of FPGAs, or field-programmable gate arrays. Those are specialized processors that can provide faster performance than standard chips, such as central processing units, for certain types of workloads. FPGAs’ speed stems from the fact that their circuits are customizable.

If a regular processor includes 1 billion circuits optimized to run artificial intelligence software, customers can’t add more. The same is not true for FPGAs. Because an FPGA is customizable, users can transform some of its transistors into AI-optimized circuits and thereby increase the amount of processing power available to machine learning applications, which boosts their performance.

AI is not the only use case to which such chips can be applied. FPGAs are used to power industrial equipment, network devices and a variety of other systems. Customers can adapt an FPGA’s customizable circuits for the task they wish to perform by modifying the onboard software.

Today’s report that Intel may sell a stake in Altera comes a few weeks after the FPGA maker detailed a new chip family. The Agilex 3 series, as the product line is called, is designed to power compact devices such as internet of things systems. Alongside programmable circuits that customers can optimize for their use cases, Agilex 3 chips include a dual-core CPU based on a design from Arm Holdings plc.

Altera’s largest competitor is Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which entered the FPGA market in 2022 through its $49 billion acquisition of Xilinx. The deal established AMD as the largest maker of such processors.

Since completing the Xilinx acquisition, the chipmaker has made several additions to its FPGA product portfolio. The newest addition is an accelerator card for servers that debuted on Monday. The device uses a chip from the Xilinx-developed Alveo line of FPGAs to speed up financial institutions’ electronic trading software.

Photo: Intel