AMD → Xilinx
AMD's all-share purchase of Xilinx, the leading maker of programmable chips, was agreed at $35bn in October 2020 and worth about $49bn by completion in February 2022 because AMD's shares had risen — the largest semiconductor acquisition completed to that date.
An all-stock deal at 1.7234 AMD shares per Xilinx share; AMD's share price rise lifted the closing value to roughly $49bn.
- Value
- $35B
- Announced
- October 2020
- Completed
- February 2022
- Sector
- Technology
- Deal type
- acquisition
- Acquirer
- AMD (United States)
- Target
- Xilinx (United States)
Why it mattered
Xilinx, founded in 1984, led the market for field-programmable gate arrays, chips that customers can reconfigure after manufacture, sold into communications, industrial, aerospace and defence, automotive and data-centre markets. AMD, under Lisa Su, wanted them alongside its processors and graphics chips to become what it called the industry's high-performance computing leader. The agreement announced on 27 October 2020 gave Xilinx holders a fixed 1.7234 AMD shares for each of theirs, about $143 a share at the time, leaving AMD's shareholders with about 74% of the combined company and Xilinx's with 26%. AMD expected about $300m of operating efficiencies within 18 months, and at least two Xilinx directors were to join its board.
Closing was expected by the end of 2021 but waited on China's market regulator, which gave conditional approval in January 2022: no tying of AMD processors to Xilinx chips, continued supply to Chinese customers on fair and non-discriminatory terms, and continued support for Arm processors in Xilinx's programmable chips. The deal completed on 14 February 2022, days after Nvidia abandoned its purchase of Arm in the face of regulatory objections.
What it left behind
Victor Peng, Xilinx's chief executive, became president of a new Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group, and in June 2023 the Xilinx brand was phased out in favour of AMD. The business landed mainly in AMD's Embedded segment, which reached $5.3bn of revenue in 2023, its first full year with Xilinx, then fell 33% to $3.6bn in 2024 as customers ran down their inventories, and to $3.5bn in 2025. AMD's growth came from elsewhere: Data Center revenue reached $16.6bn in 2025 on EPYC processors and Instinct GPUs, and its later acquisitions, such as ZT Systems in March 2025, were aimed at AI systems. A fixed exchange ratio lets the headline price move with the buyer's shares, here by $14bn without renegotiation; judging the deal on that figure says more about the acquirer's stock than about what it bought.