Public subsidies
Another outstanding legal matter concerns public subsidies. AMD got a fair bit of ‘encouragement' from the public purse to build its fabs in Dresden and is expected to incentivised to the tune of $1.2 billion to build a new fab in Malta, which confusingly is actually a town in New York state.
Again there are concerns that these chunks of public lucre are designed for AMD alone and may be jeopardised by the fact that it's a minority shareholder in TFC. "As part of this announcement we have disclosed our intentions to move forward with a new state-of-the-art facility in upstate New York," says Grose.
"Once complete, we expect this to be the world's most advanced foundry with 22nm process technology. The next steps are to transfer the incentives from AMD to the Foundry Company and successfully close the transaction."
So the transfer of these incentives is a work in progress and not yet guaranteed. As you would expect this has been given high priority within TFC and is being pursued by Ruiz. While it would be a major setback to TFC and AMD if New York were to pull out, the set-back would not be as terminal as the loss of its x86 license.
An artist's impression of what the New York fab will look like