Oracle Wants a Chip Company? Which One?

Oracle may not have a five-year acquisition budget –or a one-year acquisition budget, for that matter–but if it did it would include a line item for a chip company or two. CEO Larry Ellison says the company’s acquisitive appetites these days are leaning toward silicon.

“Our focus is to build our [intellectual property] portfolio,” he said during a meeting with analysts Thursday. “You could see us buying chip companies. Silicon is very important.”

So if Oracle (ORCL) were to acquire a chip company, which would it be? Wall Street seems to think it’s ARM. The chip designer’s shares spiked about six percent following Ellison’s remarks, though it’s not clear that ARM is what he had in mind when he made them. Certainly there are other potential targets: Broadcom, Marvell (MRVL), Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD), of course. Said Gleacher & Co. analyst Doug Freedman, “You’ve got to think it’s focused on enterprise hardware, on the server. AMD jumps off the screen.”