Silver Lake at centre of Dell deal talks Negotiations over a possible buyout of Dell, the struggling PC maker, centre on Silicon Valley private equity firm Silver Lake, along with international investors in Silver Lake's own funds who are considering investing alongside the firm, according to people familiar with the discussions. Temasek, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, are among the investors who are closely involved in talks about a Dell deal, several people familiar with the situation said. Barclays, Credit Suisse, Bank of America and Royal Bank of Canada are in discussions about providing the financing for a buy-out, two people said. With Dell's stock market value reaching nearly $23bn on Tuesday, a deal, if completed, would amount to the biggest buy-out ever of a technology concern, topping the $17.5bn that a group of investors led by Blackstone paid for semiconductor company Freescale in 2006. However, one person familiar with the Dell discussions warned that a deal being finalised was still a long-shot given the massive size of the potential transaction. The Freescale deal was completed close to the peak of the private equity bubble, when private equity firms were more willing to pool their resources on giant deals and the debt markets investors were prepared to see higher levels of leverage. Despite that, Dell's shares rose strongly for a second day on Tuesday as investors anticipated a buy-out offer. They closed at $13.17, some 21 per cent higher than before news of the deal was first reported by Bloomberg. With Silver Lake the only private equity firm involved in the buy-out discussions, the talks have come to revolve around bringing in some of the limited partner investors in the Silicon Valley firm's own funds as co-investors on the deal, according to people familiar with the discussions. The firm, which pioneered tech buy-outs more than a decade ago, has a history of investing alongside some of its biggest investors to support large deals. The Canadian pension fund also backed its buy-out of Skype, while Temasek was a joint investor in Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba in 2011 when Silver Lake first took a stake. Silver Lake also has a close relationship with Calpers, the Californian teachers" pension fund, which took an equity stake of nearly 10 per cent in the buy-out firm five years ago. Any Dell deal is also likely to be heavily dependent on Michael Dell, the founder who owns around 15 per cent of the company's shares. Large tech buy-outs have had a mixed track record. Chip companies Freescale and NXP, both involving groups of private equity firms led respectively by Blackstone and KKR, struggled before going public over the past two years at a price well short of their backers" hopes. SunGard Data Systems, a $10.8bn Silver Lake-led transaction from the middle of the last decade that made giant tech buy-outs fashionable, has yet to produce the returns and the company is still private long after the normal expected exit for such an investment.