US chipmaker Qualcomm has agreed to buy London-listed Alphawave Semiconductor for $2.4 billion in cash to help it “provide key assets for Qualcomm’s expansion into data centers” it said on June 9.
Reports in April suggested that Arm also explored buying Alphawave, which provides semiconductor IP that among other capabilities determines how fast information can get onto and off a chip.
The company has approximately 1,000 employees globally and has R&D centres in Canada, India, the US and Israel. Its speciality is SerDes (serializer/deserializer) technology that converts parallel data to serial data and vice versa for high-speed communication. It signed a record$515.5m of bookings in 2024, up 34% on 2023.
In 2024 it launched a chiplet group, taping out and demonstrating a multi-protocol I/O chiplet, claiming “key wins in next generation 800G/1.6T solutions for data centres, including multiple 3nm IP high-speed licensing deals for AI/HPC and networking applications [and] I/O chiplet design wins, leveraging our industry-leading portfolio of UCIe, PCIe, 112G and 224G IP for AI accelerators for LLMs…”
Alphawave Semi connectivity and compute technologies “are complementary to our power-efficient CPU and NPU cores,” said Cristiano Amon, president and CEO of Qualcomm – who is looking to reduce the firm’s reliance on a notably slowing smartphone market.
He added in a canned statement: “Qualcomm’s advanced custom processors are a natural fit for data center workloads. 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 the deal to close in Q1, 2026 subject to regulatory approvals.
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