News Intel: Semi Industry Will Consoli, We Are a Willing Buyer

[Admin]

Intel's CEO points to M&A opportunities as the semiconductor industry is set to consoli.

Intel: Semi Industry Will Consoli, We Are a Willing Buyer : Read more

 

[Diabl0]

Many big words and promises from Intel lately. That is all.

 

[InvalidError]

The semiconductor industry is already dangerously over-consolidated IMO with only three major players having an effective oligopoly on bleeding-edge fabs. That doesn't leave many options to go to when you need something made and anything happens with any one of them. Lack of meaningful competition at the high-end is part of the reason why we have the current chip shortage that started pre-covid, covid merely provided the final shove that sent the whole industry tumbling toward chip shortage hell with an coincident supply chain disruptions and demand spike.

Healthy competition and supply chain robustness requires independent supply diversity.

 

[bigdragon]

Intel's statements here are why I think mergers and acquisitions need to be banned in certain industries or once companies reach a certain size. Intel needs more competition, not less. I cannot think of an example where consolidation improved an industry for anyone outside the financial world.

 

[InvalidError]

I cannot think of an example where consolidation improved an industry for anyone outside the financial world.

Intel acquiring Altera to integrate FPGA and high-speed fabric tech into CPUs and other chips makes sense: the two product categories don't really compete with each other and are logical complements for things like high-speed networking, HPC, deep-learning, etc. and AMD ended up acquiring Xilinx for fundamentally identical reasons.

The next logical acquisition with chiplet/tile based CPUs and GPUs would be a DRAM manufacutrer/fab to internally source custom embedded RAM.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

The semiconductor industry is already dangerously over-consolidated IMO with only three major players having an effective oligopoly on bleeding-edge fabs. That doesn't leave many options to go to when you need something made and anything happens with any one of them. Lack of meaningful competition at the high-end is part of the reason why we have the current chip shortage that started pre-covid, covid merely provided the final shove that sent the whole industry tumbling toward chip shortage hell with an coincident supply chain disruptions and demand spike.

Healthy competition and supply chain robustness requires independent supply diversity.

We need a simple rule, if an industry only has "Single Digits" worth of major players, then Mergers & Acquisitions are BANNED.

You want to buy off a company, defeat them in the market and bankrupt your competition. Then buy off the assets of their corpse.

Until then, we should bar "ANY & ALL" 'Mergers & Acquisitions' while there are single digit competitors in any field.