EU clears Intel takeover of Altera

Intel gets green light from the European Commission to acquire Altera, enabling it to close the biggest deal in its history. At the same time, the company released its quarterly results, which show Intel’s cloud computing revenues are growing.

The European Commission has published its verdict on the deal between Intel and Altera on its website. According to the European authorities, there will still be sufficient competition in the chip market after the takeover; the Commission notes that Intel and Altera serve other parts of the market; the latter builds chips for various industries, such as automotive, medical devices and telecom.

Due to the assessment of the European Commission, the takeover can therefore go ahead. The acquisition of Altera involves an amount of 16.7 billion dollars, which translates into 14.6 billion euros. Intel announced the acquisition in June, saying it will take approximately six to nine months to complete.

With the acquisition, Intel hopes to be able to further diversify in the field of chip production. The company confirmed this when announcing the quarterly figures: in an interview with The New York Times, CFO Stacy Smith said that Intel ‘is no longer a PC company’. The company focuses more on cloud computing, automation, wearables and things like the internet of things.

This shift from PC to other types of devices is related to the decline in sales in the PC market, which was also reflected in the quarterly figures. Intel generated $8.5 billion in revenue from PC chips and $4.1 billion in server chips in the quarter. Although Intel still gets a significant part of its revenue from PC chips, revenue from this branch has been falling for some time, while that from servers is rising. Intel shipped 15 percent fewer chips for PCs and 14 percent less for notebooks in the quarter, compared to the same period a year earlier.

In the past quarter, Intel made a profit of 3.11 billion dollars, which is converted to 2.72 billion euros. That is a decrease of 6.3 percent compared to the same period last year.