News GlobalFoundries Owner Eyes $20 Billion Valuation for IPO

[Admin]

Mubadala seeks to list GlobalFoundries at a $20 billion valuation.

GlobalFoundries Owner Eyes $20 Billion Valuation for IPO : Read more

 

[Giroro]

$20 Billion is what TSMC wants taxpayers to pay them to build a single fab, which they intend to keep.
Maybe the US or EU should just buy all of Global Foundries, instead.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

$20 Billion is what TSMC wants taxpayers to pay them to build a single fab, which they intend to keep.
Maybe the US or EU should just buy all of Global Foundries, instead.

Problem is GloFo is mostly just two 12nm fabs these days. So it needs to spend $10-$15 billion on each fab to retrofit it with 7nm tech, or maybe even go straight for 5nm. At this point, GloFo should probably just license the tech from TSMC.

 

[InvalidError]

Problem is GloFo is mostly just two 12nm fabs these days. So it needs to spend $10-$15 billion on each fab to retrofit it with 7nm tech, or maybe even go straight for 5nm. At this point, GloFo should probably just license the tech from TSMC.

There isn't much to license from TSMC, most of the real magic happens at ASML and Cadence/Synopsis. The foundries are mainly responsible for developing their primitive libraries optimized for their respective processes. If GloFo wanted to "license" TSMC's stuff, it would need to copy TSMC's fabs almost exactly.

Don't expect GloFo to make any major process investments though, it gave up on that years ago when it abandoned the race to 7nm. It likely won't bother with 7nm until the equipment becomes cheap and the risk has gone down to near-zero. Being one or two steps behind everyone else is fine. It may not be as glorious but there will always be demand for more coarse chips and, with new 2.5D designs on the horizon, there will be plenty of need for 10-16nm substrates and interposers.

 

[vern72]

Yeah, I don't see how they can be that profitable if they are not going to compete on the cutting edge. The demand is certainly there and the supply is really not keeping up.

 

[average joe]

actually i though glofo was only profitable because it dropped out of the node race. It making money on manufacutring dram for ssd's and memory; there's alot more of those chips on a pci card than the one gpu or ssd controller. Dram is still manufactured at 20nm or 10nm, chipsets are at even older nodes.

 

[InvalidError]

Dram is still manufactured at 20nm or 10nm, chipsets are at even older nodes.

Everything is moving forward, albeit at various speeds. Micron began testing 7nm DDR5 back in 2018. Chipsets will be moving to 7nm once CPUs and GPUs are off to 5nm or smaller, though you could argue this has already started if you include Zen 2 and upcoming Zen 3 APUs which are both monolithic 7nm chips.