AMD is acquiring little-known semiconductor company Xilinx for $35.000 billion, making it its biggest acquisition to date. The deal is expected to close in late 2021 and will serve to strengthen competition with Intel and Nvidia in the lucrative data center market. Xilinx specializes in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a type of semiconductor that can be changed even when deployed. This level of programmability often makes them slower than GPUs or CPUs, but also much more versatile. Being so versatile means Xilinx technology can be used almost anywhere in a data center, which is great when dealing with a variety of tasks. For example, a cloud storage company will have a different workload than a VPN service, website building platform, or video conferencing service. Therefore, AMD's chip design strategy seems like a natural fit for expanding Xilinx's footprint in the data center ecosystem.