The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced its approval of AMD's plan to acquire Xilinx in an all-stock transaction worth roughly $35 billion. The CMA didn't offer many details about its decision at time of writing. "The CMA has cleared the anticipated acquisition by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. of Xilinx, Inc.," it said in today's update. "The full text of the decision will be available shortly." AMD announced its plans to acquire Xilinx in October 2020. The deal would give AMD shareholders a 74% stake in the combined company; Xilinx shareholders would own the other 26%. Both companies' boards of directors unanimously approved the deal. The companies then announced in April that their shareholders "overwhelmingly" approved of the deal, and AMD said it expected regulators to clear the acquisition by the end of the year. The CMA's decision brings that expectation closer to reality. AMD has said the combined company would invest over $2.7 billion in R&D annually to continue development of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, SoCs, and other technologies with more obscure initialisms. Xilinx's experience with deep learning—on which the companies have collaborated in the past—is likely vital to AMD's plans for the future. This isn't the only major acquisition the CMA has considered this year. The regulator is also supposed to prepare a report on Nvidia's proposed acquisition of Arm by July 31. Let's see if recent support for that acquisition will lead to a similar decision.
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