The Milpitas-based vertical-power-delivery firm puts more than 3,000 amps of current directly under the GPU. The deal could be announced as soon as Tuesday.
Analog Devices is in advanced talks to acquire Empower Semiconductor, the closely held Californian power-management chip company, for $1.5bn in cash, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. A transaction could be announced as soon as Tuesday, US time.
Neither company has publicly confirmed the discussions on the record.
What Empower makes is the operationally critical piece behind the AI data-centre buildout. The Milpitas-based company, founded in 2014, designs integrated voltage regulators that sit directly under the GPU or other AI accelerator and deliver more than 3,000 amps of current up through the PCB rather than across it.
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The company’s Crescendo platform, unveiled in October 2024, has been the most-cited example of ‘vertical power delivery’ (VPD), the architectural shift that the largest GPU suppliers have been pushing into their next-generation reference designs as power densities at the rack-level have outgrown traditional lateral power topology.
The technical claim that has carried Empower into this category is straightforward. Placing the voltage regulator directly under the accelerator, rather than alongside it, can save approximately 20% of total system power on Empower’s published estimates, by eliminating the resistive losses incurred when 3,000-amp currents are routed laterally.
For a hyperscaler running tens of gigawatts of AI compute across a multi-year capex cycle, the implied operational saving is large enough to make the underlying voltage-regulator IP a strategic asset rather than a commoditised component.
Empower closed a $140m+ Series D in late 2024, led by Fidelity Management & Research with participation from Maverick Silicon, CapitalG, Atreides Management, Socratic Partners, Walden Catalyst Ventures, Knollwood and an Abu Dhabi Investment Authority subsidiary.
The $1.5bn price tag on the rumoured Analog Devices deal represents a meaningful step up from that round and reflects the rerating that hyperscaler-aligned AI-power suppliers have experienced through the spring.
Analog Devices, the New York Stock Exchange-listed analogue and mixed-signal incumbent with a ~$140bn market capitalisation, has spent the past two years acquiring its way into the AI-infrastructure thesis.
Empower would slot into ADI’s power-management division alongside its existing voltage-regulation portfolio, with the strategic logic being that the bidder is buying VPD intellectual property and design talent rather than a commoditised manufacturing capacity.
Whether ADI plans to integrate Empower’s design into its existing roadmap or run the acquired business as a standalone unit serving hyperscaler customers will be the visible structural detail when the deal is formally announced.
The macro context is the part that the financial press commentary has consistently underplayed. Big Tech 2026 capex commitments now exceed $650bn across Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Apple, with most of the spend going to AI-data-centre infrastructure.
The bottleneck has been migrating progressively further upstream, from GPU supply (the Nvidia-volume problem of 2024) to data-centre site availability (the 2025 problem) to power-delivery architecture (the 2026 problem).
The NextEra-Dominion $67bn utility merger announced this week is the macro version of the same trade; the ADI-Empower deal is the chip-level version.
The competitive read for the broader power-semi category is the part the rest of the sector will be watching for. If $1.5bn is the clearing price for a private VPD specialist with $140m of disclosed prior funding and a Crescendo-class product, the implied multiples for the listed power-semi peers (Vicor, Texas Instruments’ power-management division, Infineon, STMicroelectronics) will be visible in pre-market trading on Tuesday.
Bloomberg’s reporting does not include the negotiated multiple of Empower’s run-rate revenue or the expected closing timeline, beyond noting that a deal could be announced ‘as soon as Tuesday’.
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