Qualcomm Inc. is acquiring Alphawave IP Group plc, a U.K.-based provider of technology for linking together chips, in a $2.4 billion deal.

The companies announced the transaction today. It doesn’t come as a surprise: Qualcomm first disclosed plans to make a bid for Alphawave in early April. Its offer amounts to £1.83 per share, a 98% premium to the British chip designer’s last unaffected trading price.

Qualcomm said the acquisition will support its efforts to grow its share of the data center chip market. The company didn’t go into detail, stating only that Alphawave’s technology will “complement Qualcomm’s next gen custom Qualcomm Oryon CPU.” That hints the chipmaker may be planning to launch a data center version of its Oryon central processing unit series, which is currently only available for laptops.

The company announced plans to launch data center CPUs last month. At the time, the company stated that the chips will be geared toward artificial intelligence clusters powered by Nvidia Corp. silicon. 

Besides the Oryon CPU series, Qualcomm also described Alphawave technology as complementary to its Hexagon product line. Hexagon is a family of NPUs, or neural processing units, optimized to run AI models. Qualcomm doesn’t ship them on their own but rather as part of systems-on-chip for smartphones, laptops and mixed reality headsets. A system-on-chip is a processor that includes multiple compute modules. 

Alphawave designs interconnects that can be used to link together multiple compute modules into a single SoC. One of its interconnects, AresCORE, is geared towards the data center chip market where Qualcomm hopes to grow its presence through the acquisition. AresCORE can move data between a SoC’s modules at a rate of up to 64 gigabits per second per millimeter of shoreline. A chip’s shoreline is the surface area of its sides.

The company offers AresCORE alongside a number of related technologies. One of them is GammaCORE, a chip for coordinating the flow of data across the interconnect that links together a SoC’s modules. It also offers SerDes modules. Those are components that turn multiple data streams into a single data stream, which makes it easier to move information between chiplets.

One of the use cases to which Alphawave’s technology can be applied is powering co-packaged optics, or CPO, devices. CPO is an emerging approach to moving information between data center chips. Instead of encoding data into electrical signals, CPO hardware transmits traffic as light, which can be up to several times faster.

“Qualcomm’s advanced custom processors are a natural fit for data center workloads,” said Qualcomm Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon. “The combined teams share the goal of building advanced technology solutions and enabling next-level connected computing performance across a wide array of high growth areas, including data center infrastructure.”

Qualcomm expects to complete the acquisition in the first quarter of 2026. Alphawave investors with about half the company’s shares have already approved the transaction.

Photo: Qualcomm