Canyon Bridge Capital Partners’ all-cash offer for Imagination showed the buyout fund remained focused on investing in western chip-makers after its $1.3bn (£960m) deal to buy Lattice Semiconductor was blocked over US national security concerns. Canyon Bridge was founded with capital from the Chinese government and has indirect links to Beijing’s space programme. Imagination, whose chips have been used in devices including Apple’s iPhone, licenses graphics and video-processing technology to semiconductor companies. Lattice makes chips known as “field-programmable gate arrays”, which let companies put their own software on chips for different uses. In the past two years, the Chinese government has set aside at least 350bn yuan (£39bn) to invest in new technologies.

Source: The Guardian September 23, 2017 09:45 UTC