Altera Files Confidentially for a US IPO That Could Raise $2 Billion

Altera, the FPGA maker Intel bought for $16.7 billion in 2015, filed confidentially for a US IPO on September 15, 2026, aiming to raise more than $2 billion, a year after Intel handed majority control to Silver Lake.

Intel paid $54 a share for Altera in 2015. All cash, $16.7 billion total, the biggest deal in the company's history. Eleven years later, Intel doesn't run Altera anymore. It doesn't even own most of it.

On September 15, 2026, Altera filed confidentially with the SEC for a US initial public offering, according to Bloomberg and Axios. The filing is the clearest signal yet that the FPGA maker is heading back to public markets it left more than a decade ago. This time, though, Intel doesn't call the shots.

Silver Lake now holds 51% of Altera, the private equity firm that bought in last year. Abu Dhabi's MGX co-invested alongside Silver Lake for a stake of its own, according to Bloomberg's reporting on the deal and MGX's own announcement. Intel kept the other 49%. A minority position, now, in a business it once owned outright.

The IPO could raise more than $2 billion, Bloomberg reported. Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are underwriting the deal. None of the numbers are final. A confidential filing lets Altera work out pricing and structure with regulators before anything goes public, and the company hasn't said when it actually plans to list.

The Silver Lake deal closed in September 2025, five months after it was announced. Silver Lake paid $4.46 billion for its 51% stake, valuing Altera at $8.75 billion overall, well below the $16.7 billion Intel spent to buy the whole company a decade earlier. That gap says a lot about how the FPGA business performed inside Intel.

Altera builds field-programmable gate arrays, chips customers can reconfigure in the field instead of swapping out, sold mostly under the Agilex brand. The newest versions carry what Altera calls AI Tensor Blocks, hardware built specifically to speed up AI inference. Altera posted $1.54 billion in revenue in 2024. Under CEO Raghib Hussain, who took over in May 2025 after running product at Marvell and co-founding Cavium, the business has picked up pace: six chip tape-outs in three months, 20% revenue growth, and 60% fewer product returns, according to EE Times.

Hyperscalers spent 2024 and 2025 racing to buy every Nvidia GPU they could get. Now they're hedging. FPGAs sit in a different lane. Industrial automation, robotics, telecom gear, AI inference workloads that don't need a full GPU cluster to run. That diversification is exactly why a company like Altera can credibly pitch a $2 billion IPO in a market otherwise obsessed with one chip company.

The semiconductor market is projected to cross $1.29 trillion in 2026, up more than 50% from last year, according to IDC. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has had its best year since 1994. Money is flowing into anything that touches AI infrastructure, and Altera is betting investors will pay up for a chipmaker that isn't Nvidia but still sits inside the AI supply chain.

Altera isn't Intel's only spinoff bet. Mobileye, the self-driving chip unit Intel bought for $15.3 billion in 2017, went public in October 2022, and Intel still holds roughly 88% of it. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has framed the Altera sale differently. Taking Altera public, he told Bloomberg, could help both companies catch up in the AI race. Whether public investors agree is the real test here, not whether Intel needed the cash.

Also read: Qualcomm's New Snapdragon Chip Runs a 30 Billion Parameter AI With No Cloud • Waymo Lets Teens Ride Robotaxis Alone in Nashville, Not California • Huawei and Cambricon Are Charging More for AI Chips as Memory Runs Short

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