Exclusive: Altera CEO Says Intel’s IPO Plan For FPGA Unit ‘Has Not Changed’

Altera CEO Sandra Rivera denies a report that Intel is planning to outright sell its programmable chip business. ‘We are executing to the plan, which is not a sale of Altera, but rather it is selling a stake in the business, which has always been the plan, which we've communicated for now over a year, and for us to do the IPO in 2026,’ she says.

Intel’s plan to sell a stake in its Altera programmable chip business and push for an initial public offering of the unit by 2026 “has not changed,” Altera’s CEO said Tuesday.

Sandra Rivera, leader of Intel’s FPGA chip business, made the comments in an exclusive interview with CRN in response to a question about a report last week by Reuters.

Citing unnamed sources, Reuters reported that Intel plans to float to its board of directors in a mid-September meeting the potential sale of businesses not core to its strategy, including Altera. The semiconductor giant is seeking to make massive spending cuts in response to what it has called worsening financial conditions.

But Rivera denied the assertion that Intel is planning to outright sell Altera, saying that “there’s so much […] that gets written that is not true and not sourced from anyone that actually knows what’s happening.”

“We are executing to the plan, which is not a sale of Altera, but rather it is selling a stake in the business, which has always been the plan, which we've communicated for now over a year, and for us to do the IPO in 2026. That's the plan,” she said.

While Altera began operating independently from Intel at the beginning of this year, the business is still “decoupling” itself from a lot of the general and administrative functions under its parent company, but it’s “actually ahead of schedule” in that regard, with a deadline to finish such actions by Jan. 1, 2025, according to Rivera (pictured).

“We’re still on track for supporting Intel in their sale of a stake in the business. And so we've been preparing with the bankers and doing all of the requisite work to get ready for that,” she said. “And the team is very, very focused on our long-term goal, our ultimate goal, which is to be number one in the industry. And the IPO is an important and fun exciting milestone in that journey.”

Altera’s History Under Intel

Acquired by Intel for $16.7 billion in 2015, Altera designs FPGAs, short for field-programmable gate arrays, which consist of semiconductor chips that can be reprogrammed, unlike standard CPUs and ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits), for a variety of reasons, including advanced functionality.

Once integrated into Intel, the Altera name was dropped, and it became known as the Programmable Solutions Group.

Then, nearly a year ago, Intel announced its plan to split off the Programmable Solutions Group into a wholly owned stand-alone company. The parent company named Rivera, a 23-year Intel veteran who reported directly to Gelsinger and was general manager of the Data Center and AI Group at the time, as the company’s CEO.

In the October 2023 announcement, Intel said it intended to conduct an IPO for the Programmable Solutions Group and explore opportunities to sell a stake in the business to private investors over the “next two to three years,” with Intel planning to maintain a majority stake in the stand-alone company.

As originally envisioned, the spin-off of the FPGA business is meant to serve two purposes: giving Intel extra liquidity to invest in CEO Pat Gelsinger’s expensive comeback plan and expanding the FPGA company’s business opportunities.

In February of this year, the FPGA company revealed that it would revive the Altera brand and chase after an expanded market opportunity for FPGAs that exceeds $55 billion with products designed for a “broad range of applications in the comms, cloud, data center, embedded, industrial, automotive, and [military-aerospace] market segments.”

Rivera Vows Singular Focus On Broad FPGA Opportunity

In her interview with CRN, Rivera said by becoming an independent company again, Altera will be “singularly focused on the FPGA business, top to bottom, cloud to edge,” calling it the “only at-scale company left in the world” with that position.

This is the case, according to Rivera, because FPGA rival Xilinx was acquired by AMD in 2022 while other competitors focus on “low-end or certain parts of the market.”

“We just see this as a huge opportunity, of course, for ourselves, but more so to service the customers that are hungry for that type of company,” she said.

Rivera said Altera is also doubling down on the channel, with 80 percent of its volume and more than 50 percent of demand creation going through partners.

“I'm just super excited about the investments we're making, but that they're making as well in a portfolio that they know they can count on that is high margin for them, and there's such strong demand for these types of products,” she said.