DEC went through a long and complicated dismantling during the 90s. In the late 90s, Intel did eventually end up, through two different transactions, with most of the chip IP and fabs, including the StrongARM and the Alpha. StrongARM/XScale stayed relevant for a number of years, but the Alpha was already dead. There was little market for it, and the top guys had already left for AMD to design the Athlon.
Compaq eventually picked up what remained under the DEC name, which wasn't much.
What's left of DEC is scattered throughout the tech industry. What's left of their microprocessors is in Intel and AMD CPUs.
(By the way, one example wouldn't exactly prove whatever point you're trying to make. The pattern of paying a few million to a few tens of millions of dollars for a startup to shut down its existing operations would still be far more common/likely.)
