Qualcomm wants to buy Intel

On Friday afternoon, Wall Street Journal reported Intel has been approached by fellow chip giant Qualcomm about a possible takeover. While any deal is described as “far from certain,” the paper’s anonymous sources say it would mean a massive collapse for the company, which was the world’s most valuable chip company, based largely on x86 processor technology that has triumphed over Qualcomm’s Arm chips outside the phone space for years.

If a deal goes through — and if it survives regulatory scrutiny — it would be a huge win for Qualcomm, which returned to the desktop processor market this year as part of Microsoft’s AI PC strategy after years of dominating the mobile processor market.

At the time, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the company would stop all non-essential work and later announced it would spin off its chipmaking business, a part of the company that has long been seen as a strength against rival AMD and many fabless chipmakers that rely on entities like Taiwan’s TSMC to produce all their actual silicon.

Intel has also recently had to rely on TSMC for some of its cutting-edge chip production as it continues to rebuild its own manufacturing efforts (the costs of which have accounted for most of Intel’s recent losses), and its own 18A manufacturing process has reportedly encountered some issues recently.

Update, September 20: Added confirmation from NYT.