U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm (QCOM.O), opens new tab agreed to acquire Alphawave (AWE.L), opens new tab for about $2.4 billion on Monday, as part of efforts to strengthen its AI technology, sending shares of the British semiconductor company up by almost a quarter.
Alphawave is the latest British company to be snapped up in a market plagued by low valuations and stunted growth, with U.S. buyers swooping on firms at comparatively low prices and better-performing bourses proving more attractive for share listings.
Alphawave shareholders will receive 183 pence per share – a near 96% premium to the March 31 closing price immediately before Qualcomm disclosed its interest. By 0837 GMT, the stock was up 23.1%, trading just above the offer price.
Jefferies analysts said they do not expect the deal to meet any material regulatory obstacles, after Alphawave exited its Chinese joint venture, WiseWave, on Monday.
Qualcomm also made two alternative all-share offers for Alphawave on Monday after multiple deadline extensions from the UK takeover panel. However, Alphawave plans to unanimously recommend the cash offer to its shareholders, deeming it fair and reasonable.
Separately, U.S.-based quantum computing company IonQ (IONQ.N), opens new tab agreed to buy UK tech start-up Oxford Ionics in a $1.1 billion deal.
Alphawave, which designs semiconductor tech for data centers, networking, and storage, is a strategic buy for Qualcomm, which announced its return to the data center CPU market in May.
“Alphawave has developed leading high-speed wired connectivity and compute technologies that are complementary to our power-efficient central processing unit (CPU) and neural processing unit (NPU) cores,” Cristiano Amon, President and CEO of Qualcomm, said.
Alphawave also garnered takeover interest in April from SoftBank-owned Arm (O9Ty.F), opens new tab for its ‘serdes’ tech, which boosts chip data processing speeds — key for AI development — and underpins Broadcom’s (AVGO.O), opens new tab and Marvell Technology’s (MRVL.O), opens new tab multibillion-dollar custom chip businesses.
Arm walked away after initial discussions with Alphawave, Reuters exclusively reported in April citing sources.
