Intel spinoff Altera faces lay offs — 82 staff let go after Intel sold majority stake for $4.46 billion earlier this year

Programmable logic developer Altra, a spin-off from Intel that is now controlled by Silver Lake, has announced plans to cut 82 positions at its San Jose base this fall. The decision was made as part of adjusting the company to the strategy defined by its majority owner, reports PeopleMatters.

The WARN notice filed by Altera indicates that 82 employees from Altera San Jose will be laid off on October 3, 2025, but fails to reveal whether these people are engineers, managers, or are in various supporting roles. In fact, it is even unclear how many people Altera currently employs (there are claims of between 1,079 and 1,600), so it is hard to estimate how significant the cuts are for the company in general.

Earlier this year, Silver Lake bought a controlling 51% stake in Altera for $4.46 billion, leaving Intel with the remaining 49%.

The deal gave Altera full operational autonomy to concentrate on programmable logic solutions and gave a bunch of cash to Intel. At the same time, Silver Lake oversees the strategic direction of the company and set up its new CEO, Raghib Hussain, who previously served as president of Products and Technologies at Marvell and co-founded CPU developer Cavium before that.

People familiar with the situation reportedly link the job cuts to adjustments being made as the company adapts to the governance and strategic direction of its new majority shareholder, according to PeopleMatters. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to notice that the timing of these changes at Alteraa coincides with a wide turbulence for Intel, which has laid off tens of thousands of employees in recent quarters.

Based on Altera's plans published earlier this year, the FPGA specialist intended to strengthen its presence in long-standing sectors, including automotive, aerospace, and telecom, while also pursuing expansion in emerging markets such as AI, cloud infrastructure, edge computing, and next-generation wireless technologies.

When Intel bought Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion — its biggest takeover at the time — it viewed the FPGA maker as a key opportunity to broaden its sources of income and potentially strengthen its standing in the data center market. However, the high-tech giant has failed to grow Altera's business, which is why it had to sell a controlling stake earlier this year at a valuation of around $8.745 billion.

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