Google has purchased Agnilux, a secretive chip house made up of engineers who architected the heart of the Apple iPad, then left the company.

Google has purchased Agnilux, a secretive chip house made up of engineers who architected the heart of the iPad, then left the company.

Reuters' PEHub reported the story Tuesday night. A Google spokesman also confirmed the acquisition to PCMag.com.

"We're pleased to welcome the Agnilux team to Google, but we don't have any additional information to share right now," a Google spokesman said Tuesday night via email.

What is Agnilux up to? No one really knows. Company executives include those from PA Semi, which in 2008. That team then created the A4 chip, which powers the iPad. According to The New York Times, the team, which includes Amarjeet Gill, Mark Hayter and Puneet Kuma, was working on some sort of a server. Dan Dobberpuhl, the chief executive of PA Semi, was reported to have led Agnilux as well, after he departed the company.

However, as a chip company, its probably reasonable to assume that Agnilux was working on a low-power architecture to drive a server, perhaps a small microserver.

That's the road analyst firm Rethink Wireless thinks Google is heading down. "At the other end of the scale from PA, Agnilux fits into a nascent, but potentially significant, trend, to create massive cloud server architectures based on the ARM architecture rather than Intel or specialist silicon platforms," Caroline Gabriel wrote. "This would reduce cost by introducing a far larger range of suppliers and developers to the rarefied world of high performance servers, argue supporters, and would address power issues."

Potential competitors include Smooth-Stone, Gabriel said, which is working on a massively scalable ARM-based server, and Intel, which is trying to develop its Atom cores or derivatives of such into similar scalable computing solutions.