Intel Corp yesterday said that it is walking away from its attempt to acquire Tower Semiconductor Ltd, abandoning a US$5.4 billion deal after failing to win regulatory approval in time.
Intel has mutually agreed with Tower Semiconductor to terminate the agreement reached in February last year, it said in a statement.
The purchase of the Israeli company was the keystone of Intel chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger’s plan to get into a faster-growing part of the semiconductor industry, the foundry market dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電).
Photo: Reuters
Tower has a relatively small presence in that area — where companies make chips for customers on a contract basis — but has expertise and customers that Intel lacks.
“We will continue to look for opportunities to work together” with Tower in the future, Gelsinger said in the statement.
Intel is to pay Tower a termination fee of US$353 million.
When the transaction was announced, Intel said that it would take “about 12 months.”
The chipmaker had offered US$53 a share to acquire Tower Semiconductor for about US$5.4 billion.
As of October last year, Intel said that it was targeting the first quarter of this year, but then in March warned that the date might slip into the second quarter.
The deadline for completing the transaction was Tuesday at midnight in California.
Increasing tension between China and the US has made securing approval for transactions that require the signoff from regulators in Beijing and Washington increasingly difficult, particularly those involving semiconductors, a key area of friction in the relationship.
While Tower is a fraction of the size of Intel and TSMC in terms of revenue, it is active in older types of production-making chips for big customers such as Broadcom Inc.
Although those chips do not require the state-of-the-art production techniques that an Intel or Nvidia Corp processor demands, many new types of chips for markets such as electric vehicles can be made in older plants.
Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said that the deal’s failure would be a setback for Intel.
“A failed deal does seem modestly disappointing for the prospects of Intel’s foundry efforts,” Rasgon wrote in a research note. “Overall Intel’s foundry efforts were never going to be easy even with Tower, but now may prove to be even more challenging without.”
PROTECTION: The investigation, which takes aim at exporters such as Canada, Germany and Brazil, came days after Trump unveiled tariff hikes on steel and aluminum products US President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered a probe into potential tariffs on lumber imports — a move threatening to stoke trade tensions — while also pushing for a domestic supply boost. Trump signed an executive order instructing US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to begin an investigation “to determine the effects on the national security of imports of timber, lumber and their derivative products.” The study might result in new tariffs being imposed, which would pile on top of existing levies. The investigation takes aim at exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil, with White House officials earlier accusing these economies of
Teleperformance SE, the largest call-center operator in the world, is rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system that softens English-speaking Indian workers’ accents in real time in a move the company claims would make them more understandable. The technology, called accent translation, coupled with background noise cancelation, is being deployed in call centers in India, where workers provide customer support to some of Teleperformance’s international clients. The company provides outsourced customer support and content moderation to global companies including Apple Inc, ByteDance Ltd’s (字節跳動) TikTok and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. “When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard
‘SACRED MOUNTAIN’: The chipmaker can form joint ventures abroad, except in China, but like other firms, it needs government approval for large investments Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) needs government permission for any overseas joint ventures (JVs), but there are no restrictions on making the most advanced chips overseas other than for China, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. US media have said that TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to companies such as Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp, has been in talks for a stake in Intel Corp. Neither company has confirmed the talks, but US President Donald Trump has accused Taiwan of taking away the US’ semiconductor business and said he wants the industry back
PROBE CONTINUES: Those accused falsely represented that the chips would not be transferred to a person other than the authorized end users, court papers said Singapore charged three men with fraud in a case local media have linked to the movement of Nvidia’s advanced chips from the city-state to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek (深度求索). The US is investigating if DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose AI model’s performance rocked the tech world in January, has been using US chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China, Reuters reported earlier. The Singapore case is part of a broader police investigation of 22 individuals and companies suspected of false representation, amid concerns that organized AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of nations such
RSS