News Intel in Talks To Buy GlobalFoundries for $30 Billion: Report

[waltc3]

AMD spun off their manufacturing arm because they were so broke as a company they couldn't afford to stay in the business. It takes huge amounts of capital to build and upgrade fabs. Before they sold it off, AMD had over $5 billion in debt and they actually had to stop the upgrade of one of their facilities and cancel planned new ones because they couldn't secure the necessary capital to pay for them. As part of the deal to offload the fabs, AMD also offloaded over a billion dollars in debt to the new company. It didn't matter what AMD wanted, they only had one financial option which was to sell it off if they wanted the remaining company to stay afloat.

Right--whatever the reasons--AMD unloaded the Fabs at a benefit to itself and doesn't want them back.

 

[waltc3]

Getting to 7nm is the most useless thing ever if you can't make enough of them to sell one to everybody that wants one.
Even if AMD could get 100% of TSMCs output of 7nm they would still be a small player compared to intel.

Maybe intel wants the fabspace to upgrade it to 7nm so they can provide all the chips to the whole world.
Maybe intel just wants the patents and the fabs themselves are just a bonus.
Maybe the whole thing is just fake news.

Every single announcement intel makes includes the "we are industry leaders" "we have the cutting edge" and so on.

Your fake news assessment strikes me as the most likely...😉

 

[Bazzy 505]

Seems a bit strange since they already have some factories of their own. It's really ironic considering where GF came from.

It actually makes a perfect sense, if Intel is comitted to start offering foundry services. You have to keep in mind that lion's share of chip demand is not in leading edge nodes. For instance most of what automotive uses is build is older mature nodes, and ever since automotive started switching to electric, there have been shortages even before pandemic, be socs, various mixed circuits, heck even silly things like molex and stocko connectors.

The billion dollar question is wheather US regulators would be willing to approve such transaction. GF owners have been trying to sell it for ages, it's fabs are around at around 80% utilization, but would have needed substatial capital injection to keep it that way in near future, so there won't be a better time to sell.

 

[escksu]

The purpose of subsidizing new FAB construction is to keep the country at the technology forefront. Buying existing non-leading edge fabs doesn't accomplish that. Nor does it create new jobs, which in turn generates more tax revenue.

You dont need leading edge fabs for everything. Vast majority of the components used in your mainboard arent even 14nm..... Most are 28-45nm. NIC controllers, chipsets etc do not need 7nm. Even 14nm is not needed. This is where global foundries is good at. Intel even had to outsource their chipset manufacuturing to free up capacity for their cpus.