The Internet search giant shows interest in a small and shady start-up

Apr 21, 2010 12:59 GMT  ·  By

A mysterious acquisition from Google has thrown the Internet ablaze. By acquiring a company supposedly making server chips (no clear confirmed details available), Google spurred talks of building a new server model for their data center. And while it previously commissioned all server architectures, there are a lot more clues that might point out this not being the reason behind the acquisition.

As PEHub firstly announced and pointed out, the company was founded and funded by a handful of former Apple employees that previously formed and sold PA Semi to Apple back in 2008. Many of their original personnel stayed with Apple, but some of them went on to found Agnilux as well.

While PA Semi worked on many hardware parts for Apple's iPad, Agnilux kept its activities very quiet until this acquisition. Some rumors had Agnilux previously going to Texas Instruments, Cisco and even Microsoft, just before Google stepped in, stealing the company from its competitors.

No financial details are known at this moment, but the price shouldn't be that high since the firm wasn't that active on the market to begin with. The real value of the transaction should come from know-how it might offer in certain areas.

That knowledge could find itself in many of Google's products like Nexus One, Google TV, and Google Chrome OS. We said Google TV because among Agnilux's founders is Scott Redman, a former software engineer at TiVo, a very successful video recording (DVR) platform.

Agnilux had other moments in the spotlight, when the company was featured in the New York Times, but since then, their website went offline, not offering any extra information or comments on the deal.

Just for the facts, the company's name, Agnilux, comes from the association of two ancient words, the Sanskrit word for “fire” (gni) and the Latin word for “light” (lux).