Intel pays VIA $ 125 million for Centaur employees, but not the company itself

What happened now? In what looks like a mysterious and unusual deal, Intel has agreed to pay VIA Technologies $ 125 million for poaching some employees from one of its subsidiaries. The subsidiary itself, however, is not for sale and further details are not yet available.

Taiwanese company VIA Technologies sent out a press release this week that briefly discusses the Intel deal. It only says that Intel will be able to “hire” some of the employees of Centaur Technology, VIA’s x86 subsidiary, if VIA pays $ 125 million. In fact, Intel will not buy Centaur in bulk, and VIA will keep Centaur’s business.

The Centaur website is mainly shabby clean and currently only consists of a message informing visitors that it is under construction.

Intel confirmed deal with AnandTech, but after the announcement, VIA did not provide any further details, and Centaur still has not commented on the deal. According to AnandTech, Taiwanese news site United Daily News next confirmed that Intel isn’t getting the real Centaur company, so aside from some experience, it’s a little unclear what Intel is paying for.

VIA may retain ownership of Centaur along with its designs and patents, but the apparent reboot of the Centaur website signals some significant change. The closing date of the deal has not been disclosed.

In a press release, VIA mentions that its contract with Intel has certain terms, but does not mention those terms. It only says that Intel will pay out the full $ 125 million after the deal closes.

Centaur has been with VIA since 1999. In 2019 Centaur disclosed a class of server processors that WikiChip Fuse considers to be competitive with Intel Skylake processors and first generation AMD Zen processors.