ADI buys Empower for $1.5B and then reports record 2Q bookings

Analog Devices announced Tuesday it will purchase Empower Semiconductor for $1.5 billion in cash in a bid to shape the architecture for how power is delivered in AI and other high-density applications.

Then on Wednesday, ADI reported fiscal second quarter revenues of $3.6 billion, an increase of 36% over a year ago. CFO Richard Puccio forecasted continued strong growth for the third quarter after seeing record bookings in B2B markets of industrial, auto and communications.  ADI stock rose on the earnings news early Wednesday but declined 5% at market opening.

While the focus of the Empower purchase may seem to be on greater power efficiency for energy-hungry data centers, there is potential for the deal to impact other domains, including Edge AI.  ADI CEO Vincent Roche said in a statement that the power technology the two companies support “extends well beyond AI data centers to any domain where energy constrains what is possible.”

Empower already makes silicon capacitors, and expects ADI to help with manufacturing and customer reach, according to the companies. The companies said they expect to enable power conversion closer to the processor in a system to shorten the power delivery pathway and improve efficiency to support higher performance. 

Empower’s FinFast technology reduces the energy footprint and total cost of ownership at data centers. It integrates voltage regulators, and the total result is designed to shrink the size of a printed circuit board and the component count. 

Traditionally, voltage regulators are placed separately on PCBs besides processors, a distance of centimeters. Empower’s Integrated Voltage Regulator (IVR) technology puts the regulator inside the processor package or next to the processor die itself, reducing the distance to a millimeter or even micrometer levels. With the regulator sitting closer to the AI processor, Empower says power loss goes down and response time increases. 

“Our technology enables the power density, speed and efficiency required by AI processors to reach their full potential, unleashing generation of performance improvements,” Empower CEO Tim Phillips said in a statement. “The combination of ADI’s power management platform, scale and operational excellence along with the system level benefits our merger enables will accelerate our adoption with customers.”

Boards of both companies have approved the agreement, which is expected to close in the second half of 2026. 

The top IVR companies, identified by Mordor Intelligence are ADI, Empower, Texas Instruments, Intel and Renesas Electronics.

ADI has positioned itself as interested in serving Edge AI customer needs and joined the EDGE AI FOUNDATION as a strategic partner in 2025.  Max Versace, ADI’s Vice President of Emergent AI, said at the time that the collaboration with the foundation was intended to shape computing paradigms for physical intelligence, which usually refers to robots, drones and other edge hardware.