Altera, the chipmaker acquired by Intel 11 years ago, has submitted a confidential IPO application.

Altera was acquired by Intel for $16.7 billion in 2015 and acquired 51% of its shares in September last year Sell Silver Lake is valued at $4.46 billion. Intel retains 49% of the shares. After the transaction is completed, Altera’s market capitalization is estimated at $8.75 billion. Today the company, best known for its FPGAs and chips used in areas such as artificial intelligence, industrial automation and robotics, filed a confidential application for an initial public offering (IPO). The number of shares to be issued and the price have not yet been determined.

Image source: Altera

Obviously, the IPO of this one-time subsidiary will allow Intel to reduce the amount of funds allocated to its development. Altera focuses on creating programmable matrices that developers can use to solve specific problems in situations where it is not possible to create specialized processors with functionality fixed at the wafer level.

Altera previously announced Increase life cycle Some of its FPGA products: Agilex, MAX 10 and Cyclone V series solutions will last until 2045. In this way, customers designing mission-critical FPGA-based systems can be confident in the long-term availability of their products. Altera chip widely used As part of a variety of platforms in the industrial, communications, aerospace, medical and transportation sectors. Such systems are typically designed for a long life and thus require the availability of critical components for 10 to 20 years or more.

The company’s potential IPO could be the largest in the semiconductor industry since British holding Arm, which raised nearly $5 billion when it entered the U.S. stock exchange in 2023. As of the end of August, a total of $137 billion had been raised in the U.S. stock market this year. That amount should increase significantly, as artificial intelligence startup Anthropic plans to raise about $100 billion by the end of October. The previous record for total funding in the United States was set in 2021, during which IPOs raised $156 billion.

Activity in the U.S. initial public offering market has surged as companies seek to capitalize on investments in artificial intelligence. Funds raised from initial public offerings (excluding special purpose companies and other similar financial institutions) amounted to US$160.6 billion. Analysts believe that 2026 will be a record year for the number and scale of stock exchange listings since the epidemic.