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
A strange way to spend 30Bil.
On the other hand GF has 8-9 foundries across the globe, including EU and US where building a new one might be even more expensive...
This would also be an IP goldmine for Intel, as well as an incredible safety net since GloFo and TSMC currently share a 10 year cross licensing agreement for decades worth of patents.
Or, if you read between the lines, it could be that Intel's attempts to make 10nm work well have failed, 7nm development may not be going as well as Intel hoped, and this is just an attempt to get more experience/knowledge/IP on board to try and correct that.
There's no way AMD is signing an exclusivity deal with any single foundry - it took them the best part of a decade just to get away from GloFo's obligation after spinning them off as an independent business, so they learned that the hard way and the entire point of becoming fabless is to have the flexibility to use any foundry available to them.
I wonder if this purchase could have a monopoly implication by making Intel too big?
Also funny how some ppl think "Intel needs to be stopped".
I'm not gonna spoonfeed this, but if a little research is done it's not hard to see how this can be a good thing.
Let it happen. And let Nvidia get ARM too.
We need consolidated efforts to guarantee chip availability in the future.
Clearly something isn't right.
I agree that NVIDIA acquiring ARM is a good idea though. Just think how fast those CPUs could go with NVIDIA accelerating them like Intel and AMD have with x86 / x64!