I found this after I came back from GTC, and it’s so absurd that I feel I have to debunk it.  During Oracle’s regular shareholders meeting, Larry Ellison went on the record with this remark:

“You’re going to see us buying chip companies,” Ellison, 66, said yesterday at Oracle’s annual meeting in San Francisco. Acquiring chipmakers would extend Oracle’s push into computer hardware, initiated in January with its purchase of Sun Microsystems Inc., a server manufacturer.

Not too surprising.  As the line between Software, Hardware, and Firmware becomes smaller, it makes sense for Oracle to follow in the steps of companies like Apple and try to bring some of that expertise in-house.  In fact, Oracle began this already in their acquisition of Sun Microsystems.  However, this statement has led some analysts to believe that Oracle may acquire Intel, AMD, or NVidia.

That’s simply ridiculous.  Oracle has $23.6B in cash and short-term investments.  Intel’s just too big to be bought, having a market cap 5times that ($108B).  AMD and NVidia are at least affordable, with market caps of $4B and $7B respectively, but still big enough to be painful.  AMD and NVidia both have completely different markets from Oracle, a merger just doesn’t make sense.

The merger of Sun and Oracle made some sense, as Sun generally provided all of the server and storage systems for Oracle.  Sun owned StorageTek, and provided some pretty significant HPC and Networking assets that really fit into the Oracle “Total Solution” business.  Buying a CPU manufacturer (or a GPU manufacturer) doesn’t offer the same type of cohesion, and where Sun was going down, both AMD and Nvidia are regularly reporting record grown each quarter.

If anything, I expect we may hear about some official strategic partnerships and possibly some stock-transfer, but simply acquisitions are out of the question.

via Oracle Plans to Acquire Chipmakers, Industry-Specific Software – Bloomberg.