Key points
- Onsemi in talks to buy Ferric for about $1 billion
- Ferric's newest regulator is designed for AI processors
- Onsemi already has a $5.7 billion purchase of Synaptics pending
Onsemi (ON) is in talks to buy Ferric, a New York startup that makes power chips for AI processors, for about $1 billion, The Information reported on Tuesday. Ferric's regulators deliver power close to the processor, an area onsemi has said it wants to expand in.
Onsemi described that goal in September 2025, when it agreed to buy the rights to Aura Semiconductor's Vcore power technologies, which power CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators in data centers. The deal would help the company "address the complete power tree in AI data center applications, from grid to core," onsemi said in the announcement. Onsemi completed that purchase on October 27, 2025, without disclosing the price.
Onsemi shares closed down 3.9% at $75.63 on Wednesday, the first session after the report. The stock had risen 6.2% on Tuesday, before the report came out after the close.
The structure of the Ferric deal is unclear and could include payments to Ferric tied to performance targets, according to Investing.com's summary of the report. A deal could be finalized in the coming days, the summary said. Neither company has announced an agreement. An onsemi spokesperson didn't respond to requests for comment, according to Seeking Alpha.
Ferric makes voltage regulators that sit next to AI chips
Ferric makes integrated voltage regulators, or IVRs. A voltage regulator converts incoming power into the low, steady voltage a processor runs on. An integrated one is small enough to sit right beside or beneath the chip. Ferric builds its regulators with thin-film magnetic materials, and the company says on its website that this makes them more than 10 times smaller than conventional solutions.
On October 13, Ferric launched the Fe1767 Newport, a 145-amp regulator that sits between the circuit board and the processor. Power travels straight up into the chip instead of across the board. Ferric says the design cuts voltage droop, the brief dip in voltage when a processor's workload suddenly jumps, by up to 57% compared with that traditional sideways delivery. The part is sampling now, with evaluation boards available to qualified customers, according to the release.
Ken Shepard, the Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, founded Ferric in 2012 with CEO Noah Sturcken, his former Ph.D. student, according to Shepard's Columbia lab page. Shepard is Ferric's chairman. The startup has raised about $41.8 million in total, Electronics Weekly reported.
Onsemi already has a $5.7 billion Synaptics deal pending
Onsemi agreed on June 25 to buy Synaptics (SYNA) in an all-stock deal worth nearly $7 billion, which CNBC said was the company's largest to date. An unnamed party then made an unsolicited competing bid for Synaptics. On October 1, the companies amended the agreement to an all-cash price of $123 per Synaptics share, about $5.7 billion in total, Quartz reported. That deal is expected to close by mid-2027.
Onsemi is scheduled to report third-quarter results on November 2, after the market closes.
