Analog Devices nears $1.5 billion cash deal for Empower Semiconductor

Analog Devices was in advanced talks to buy Empower Semiconductor for about $1.5 billion in cash, a move that would give the Wilmington, Massachusetts, company a stronger foothold in the power-delivery chips now shaping AI hardware and data-center design. Neither company immediately responded to requests for comment.

The target is not a generic chip start-up. Empower has built its business around integrated voltage regulators and vertical power delivery, technology meant to push regulation closer to the load, cut losses and improve response time for demanding processors. That matters in AI infrastructure, where bigger models and denser server racks have made power efficiency a core competitive issue, not a back-office engineering detail.

Empower has spent the past year signaling commercial traction. The company said its Crescendo chipset was in final sampling on September 24, 2025, with mass production slated for late 2025. It also closed more than $140 million in Series D financing on September 22, 2025, and announced a collaboration with Marvell Technology on June 18, 2025, to develop integrated power solutions for custom silicon platforms. Those moves suggest a company trying to move from promising specialist to indispensable supplier in the AI supply chain.

For Analog Devices, the logic is strategic as well as financial. The company said on February 18, 2026, that its second-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue outlook had a midpoint of about $2.8 billion, and it raised its quarterly dividend 11% to $1.10 per share. Its shares had climbed more than 50% in 2026, giving it more currency and confidence to pursue a sizable deal. Analog Devices already showed it can digest a major acquisition when it completed its roughly $20.8 billion purchase of Maxim Integrated in 2021.

The proposed transaction fits a larger pattern across semiconductors. As the AI build-out spreads from processors to the infrastructure that keeps them running, power-management companies have become valuable takeover targets. Larger analog and mixed-signal players are moving up the stack to own more of the bottlenecks that determine performance, reliability and energy cost. In that race, efficient power delivery is becoming as strategically important as compute itself.