Acer Inc. plans to acquire U.S. computer maker Gateway Inc. for $710 million, the Associated Press reported.

The deal will push the Taiwanese company past China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. as the world’s third-largest vendor of personal computers.

Acer plans to keep the Gateway brand in the United States and said the deal would create a company with more than $15 billion in sales and 20 million PCs shipped per year. Acer and Gateway together sold about 18.6 million PCs worldwide last year, or about 8 percent of global sales, compared with Dell Inc.’s 39.1 million units, Hewlett-Packard Co.’s 38.8 million and Lenovo’s 16.6 million, according to a technology industry research firm.

Gateway was founded in 1985 in Sioux City and relocated across the South Dakota border five years later. The company moved its headquarters to California in 1998.

The North Sioux City, S.D., plant employed nearly 6,000 people at its peak in the late 1990s and was Gateway’s last manufacturing site.

In May 2006, Gateway employed a total of about 1,800 people in South Dakota and at its headquarters in California, with about 850 of those positions based in North Sioux City.