Qualcomm’s getting serious about its bid to become a major player in the AI chip market.
The company, through subsidiary Aqua Acquisition Sub LLC, just reached an agreement to acquire UK-based Alphawave Semi at an “implied enterprise value of approximately US$2.4 billion,” Qualcomm said in a statement. The announcement comes a couple of months after Qualcomm and Arm reportedly engaged in a bidding war for the company, and just a couple of days after Alphawave officially divested its stake in a joint venture with a Chinese company, which had earlier been viewed as a hurdle to Alphawave being acquired by a US company.
Among other things, Alphawave is known for SerDes chip interconnection technology. High-speed chip connectivity is key to building chiplets and AI chip clusters that are seen as increasingly important to raising the bar for efficient compute power in AI data centers. This capability also was a major driver behind AMD’s acquisition of the team behind Enosemi last month and Nvidia’s recent announcements related to its NVLink technology, which included a mention of Qualcomm’s CPUs being integrated with Nvidia GPUs.
Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon said in a statement that Alphawave “has developed leading high-speed wired connectivity and compute technologies that are complementary to our power-efficient CPU and NPU cores. 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.”
Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, said on LInkedIn that the deal is part of Qualcomm's bid to become a "full service provider "of SoCs for AI and data center-specific functions.
"It's likely that Qualcomm will continue to make strategic acquisitions going forward to advance its efforts in AI and datacenter computing solutions," he stated. "And it's also likely we'll see major systems OEMs start offering a number of Qualcomm based solutions to their customers in the near term."
The acquisition is expected to complete during the first calendar quarter of 2026, “subject to the satisfaction or waiver (where applicable) of certain conditions,” including regulatory and shareholder approval, the Qualcomm statement said.