GlobalFoundries announced a definitive agreement to acquire chip design company MIPS, in a move focused around AI-enabled network infrastructure.

In its announcement from Tuesday, the New York-headquartered foundry firm shared that MIPS will continue to operate as a standalone business within the new setup. That business revolves around developing processor architectures, now complementing GlobalFoundries’ (GF) semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.

What makes MIPS particularly attractive to GF is its relevance in AI chip design. Recent years have seen the Sunnyvale, California business focus on RISC-V, poaching execs from the likes of AMD and RISC-V rival SiFive to bolster its mission.

Pronounced risk-five, RISC-V is an open standard instruction set (ISA) architecture based on established reduced instruction set computing (RISC) principles. Based on this, the firm’s Atlas portfolio offers compute cores designed for real-time, low-latency processing and, perhaps most pertinently, edge AI processing cores.

With the acquisition, GF is in a strong position to offer custom chip solutions for smart routers, switches, and edge-network devices that incorporate AI and machine learning functions closer to the network’s edge.

With in-house processor IP and fabrication, its custom chips are likely to attract the likes of network equipment vendors such as Cisco, and OEMs like Nokia for SoCs in 5G small cells and base stations.

AI on the edge

The low-latency and high bandwidth efficiency of AI directly embedded in edge devices is driving more interest in the market.

As reported by SDxCentral, most initial investment in edge AI is targeted at equipment that enterprises use to support on-prem use cases.

Companies like Verizon have already signed deals with the likes of Nvidia to power enterprise AI services. While ROI remains low and IoT persists as the main edge use case driver, IDC predicts the edge compute market is set for an AI-fueled boost pushing overall segment spend to $380 billion by 2028.

With MIPS on board, GF finds itself in a good position for all this loot. That said, how big of a deal the acquisition is has not been disclosed. The last public record of a MIPS sale was for $60 million, when Tallwood Venture Capital bought the company from Imagination Technologies in 2017.

Since then, the company has changed hands a few times, being bought out by Wave Computing in 2018 for an undisclosed amount.

According to Reuters, Shanghai’s CIP United acquired full licensing rights to MIPS architecture for mainland China and its territories in 2019 for $60 million. Those rights for China will remain in CIP's hands in spite of GF’s global operations of MIPS.

GF’s acquisition of MIPS is expected to close in the second half of 2025.