Qualcomm buys British chipmaker Alphawave for $2.4 billion, gains Israeli engineering hub
Acquisition brings 90 local employees and key optical DSP tech into Qualcomm’s AI push.
Qualcomm’s acquisition of British semiconductor firm Alphawave for $2.4 billion marks the latest in a series of transatlantic chip deals shaped by subdued valuations, intensifying AI demand, and a reshuffling of technical talent across global R&D hubs. Behind the high-level strategy, the transaction also deepens Qualcomm’s footprint in Israel, where Alphawave has quietly built a significant engineering base since its 2022 purchase of optical DSP startup Banias Labs.
The all-cash agreement, announced Monday, grants Qualcomm access to Alphawave’s high-speed connectivity and compute technologies for data centers, areas the San Diego-based firm has increasingly prioritized as it repositions for a post-smartphone era. Nearly 90 Alphawave employees in Israel, most of them engineers focused on optical networking and digital signal processing, will now join Qualcomm as part of the deal.
The acquisition arrives at a moment of transformation for both companies. Qualcomm, long known for its dominance in mobile chips, is re-entering the data center CPU market and racing to embed its low-power processors and AI cores into cloud infrastructure. Alphawave, for its part, has faced a bumpy trajectory since its London IPO in 2021. While it secured high-profile partners and made ambitious acquisitions, including Israel’s Banias Labs in a $240 million deal, its share price had slumped before the takeover interest surfaced.
Alphawave’s exit from its Chinese joint venture, WiseWeave, on the same day as the deal announcement may ease potential regulatory friction, analysts said. With little expected resistance from UK or U.S. authorities, the acquisition appears set to close smoothly, unlike Qualcomm’s earlier attempt to acquire Israeli V2X chipmaker Autotalks, which was delayed for nearly a year by competition reviews.
Autotalks was ultimately acquired last week for under $100 million, a fraction of its once-touted valuation. While that deal was viewed as a salvage effort for a struggling company, Qualcomm’s purchase of Alphawave has a different character: a strategic move to expand its IP portfolio in high-bandwidth connectivity as AI workloads grow more complex.
Notably, Alphawave had also drawn interest from Arm, the SoftBank-owned chip design firm, earlier this year. Arm was said to be eyeing Alphawave’s ‘serdes’ technology, critical for accelerating chip-to-chip communication, but walked away after preliminary talks. Qualcomm moved ahead with three competing bids before settling on the final offer, which represents a nearly 100% premium over Alphawave’s share price in late March.
In Israel, the impact of the acquisition will likely be felt most immediately in Hod Hasharon, where Banias Labs employees have been developing advanced coherent DSP technology for optical networking, crucial for cloud data centers and AI clusters. That technology, now under Qualcomm’s control, was originally seeded by veteran entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz, whose earlier ventures have included billion-dollar exits to Intel, Amazon, and Marvell.
