TECH:

Intel announced that it acquired Tow­er Semi­con­duc­tor for $5.4 bil­lion or $53 per share in cash. The com­pa­ny’s CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a state­ment, “Tow­er’s port­fo­lio of spe­cial­ized tech­nolo­gies, geo­graph­ic reach, deep cus­tomer rela­tion­ships and ser­vice-ori­ent­ed oper­a­tions will help evolve Intel’s foundry ser­vices and advance our goal of becom­ing a lead­ing provider of glob­al foundry capabilities.”

Tow­er, which pro­duces var­i­ous types of chips for cus­tomers in all indus­tries, includ­ing automak­ers and med­ical and indus­tri­al equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers. Its web­site shows that it has sev­en man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties locat­ed in Israel, Italy, the Unit­ed States and Japan, mak­ing 6‑inch, 8‑inch and 12-inch chips. Tom’s Hard­ware says the man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es it uses are not state-of-the-art, but the chips it makes don’t need the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy any­way. Tow­er only needs to reli­ably and con­sis­tent­ly gen­er­ate large vol­umes of chips.

Before Tow­er, Intel was report­ed­ly in talks to buy the much larg­er chip­mak­er and AMD spin-off Glob­al­Foundries for about $30 bil­lion. How­ev­er, it was not suc­cess­ful and Glob­al­Foundries chose to pur­sue an ini­tial pub­lic offer­ing instead.

Intel launched its foundry ser­vices in 2021 when it com­mit­ted $20 bil­lion to build two plants in Ari­zona and explained that it would be run as its own busi­ness unit. Ear­li­er this year, the com­pa­ny also revealed plans to build a mas­sive semi­con­duc­tor plant in Ohio that it hopes will become “the largest sil­i­con man­u­fac­tur­ing site on the plan­et.” It will use the plants in the com­plex to man­u­fac­ture both its chips and chips for cus­tomers as part of its foundry services.

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