Friday, July 16th 2021
Intel In Talks To Purchase GlobalFoundries for $30 Billion
Intel is exploring a deal to purchase GlobalFoundries for roughly $30 billion according to people familiar with the matter, which would serve as Intel's largest acquisition to date. GlobalFoundries is owned by Mubadala Investment Co and it was widely reported that the company was planning an initial public offering later this year. This latest report comes as Intel continues talks with RISC-V chip designer SiFive for a $2 billion purchase as part of a major restructuring effort led by new CEO Pat Gelsinger. Intel is planning to boost its manufacturing capacity with the IDM 2.0 initiative where they have already committed to building two new fabs in Arizona and will offer manufacturing services to other countries. GlobalFoundries currently holds about 7% of the global foundry market by revenue and has several large customers including AMD, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA.
Source:
Wall Street Journal
68 Comments on Intel In Talks To Purchase GlobalFoundries for $30 Billion
Off topic but Nvidia buying ARM is not a good thing in my opinion. They claim they will keep the status quo in regards to licensing and that they won't keep the best stuff for themselves but why should anyone believe that and if thats the case why spend all the money in the first place. Anyone with architecture license can do whatever they want with the ISA and design their own cores, thats what all of Apple's CPU are. And don't they already have one?, I thought all of Nvidia's ARM CPUs were custom designs its just that nobody cares cause they are garbage compared to what Apple is doing. It dosn't work like that. Whatever contracts are in place now would have to be fulfilled, you can't just rip them up cause GF and AMD aren't besties anymore. Besides if it goes through it would take years happen anyway and AMD is only using GF for the IO die (and maybe future smaller CPUs and GPUs?). Capacity on older nodes isn't as contentious as it is on the leading edge ones so AMD could have 14, 12nm made wherever with a little bit of redesign work.
-sarcasm off
AMD CPU in 1982:
Designed by Intel.
Made by AMD.
AMD CPU(APU) in 2022:
Designed by AMD.
Made by Intel.
I think Intel wants to keep on getting bigger like MS, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.
GF does not have a working process that would be better than Intel's "good old" 14nm. AMD is not producing much of significance in GF any more, mainly because GF is manufacturing 14/12nm stuff. Even if there is trouble (which there probably will not be) AMD should be able to source this from TSMC or Samsung without much of a problem. Or SMIC. There are even a couple more smaller players that should have the capability for this. Consolidation is probably not the right word here. Intel is today almost not competing in selling foundry business, very large majority of the production goes to Intel itself with some minor exceptions. This might be more like buying themselves into foundry business since they do get a share with GF customers.
TSMC and Samsung are the big players, SMIC is spending a lot to try and catch up, GF was being left behind and has given up on latest nodes.
Not sure if this would go through. They still fab Zen(+) CPUs and APUs, Vega and maybe even Polaris for long-term product availability of embedded and PRO series stuff. Also current things such as IODies and chipsets. Plus there are rumours about cheap 12nm APUs for chromebooks...