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
But best of all, I love the full circle irony. It would be poetic if the acquisition sank them.
The thing is that AMD does not need GF's 12nm for much longer. With TSMC and Samsung going to 3nm, 7nm process probably will become much cheaper in the future, making it a viable alternative to GF's 12nm, even from a financial perspective. AMD is building Vega, RDNA, RDNA 2, Zen 2, Zen 3 and I/O(for mobile Ryzen chips) already at 7nm at TSMC. So, they don't really need to start redesigning stuff to 7nm. What AMD could have done all this time, but they didn't was to build APUs and low core count CPUs at 12nm GF. I mean, why not build 3400G and 3100, 3300 at 12nm and free 7nm capacity? Why not build mid/low end RDNA cards at 12nm GF to fill the mid/low end market? They probably had their reasons, but it proves that they don't really have much use of GF's 12nm.
The hindrance is probably a competition on price using inferior chips, much like the game AMD has tried to play not too long ago. A loser's strategy that can work to stay afloat until the next design win.
The other aspect is in terms of production it gets you more dies per wafer. So Intel gets less product per wafer and is pushing the core limits making huge dies on lager node process, so just overall less competitive from cost to manufacture sense compared with what AMD / TSMC are doing.
but isn't this creating a monopoly on US ?
Most analytics on foundry business go by revenue so it is probably a little more even in terms of output in wafers but top players have considerably larger margins on state of the art nodes (and the accompanying R&D expenses). Foundry business shares look roughly like this:
www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20210531-10809.html
Edit:
By wafer capacity Intel is left out of top5 with 884K wafers/month. This is total installed capacity, does not exactly show not actual production - which should be close-ish to max - or foundry business share - see the note above about Intel and Samsung.
epsnews.com/2021/02/10/5-fabs-own-54-of-global-semiconductor-capacity/
This is huge if a CPU designer improves its manufacturing capabilities, we might not see a shortage ever again but competition instead, TSMC is incompetent and can't handle anything alone. Amazon has gone and bought everything it wanted and still does, where are your regulators? :)