American chipmaking venture Altera has confidentially filed for a US initial public offering (IPO), making the Silver Lake- and Intel-backed business the latest semiconductor firm seeking to tap investor appetite for AI-related businesses.
San Jose, California-based Altera is known for making programmable chips used in data centers, telecommunications networks, industrial equipment, AI applications, and aerospace and defense systems.
The firm has been reportedly preparing for an offering that could raise over USD 2 billion as early as this year.
If Altera goes ahead with this target, it would end up being one of the largest semiconductor listings since British chip designer Arm Holdings raised USD 5 billion in 2023 and Cerebras raised USD 5.55 billion in May.
South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix received over USD 26 billion in proceeds from its US listing in July this year, while other AI-related firms such as data center developer SB Energy have also sought to tap investor demand through IPOs.
Altera, as an AI chipmaker, is looking to position its programmable chips as complementary to graphics processing units (GPUs) in data centers, where they can handle networking, data processing, and some AI inference workloads.
Altera became fully standalone in September 2025 after Silver Lake acquired a 51% stake for USD 4.46 billion in a deal that valued it at USD 8.75 billion, following its purchase by Intel for about USD 16.7 billion in 2015.
Intel, even after the divestment, still retains a 49% stake in the chipmaker.
Altera will be entering the American IPO market at a time when high-profile listings, including SpaceX’s USD 75 billion offering, along with the anticipated IPO of Anthropic, have added massive momentum to the Nasdaq.
Total proceeds have surpassed USD 145 billion this year, according to data from Renaissance Capital, a provider of IPO-focused research and ETFs.