Reports: Is New York GlobalFoundries looking for an exit?

Reports: Is New York GlobalFoundries looking for an exit?
This posting clarifys an error in the second paragraph of an earlier story that incorrectly identified the wafers produced at GF’s fabs in New York as 200mm. They are in fact 300mm in diameter, as noted by a sharp reader on Facebook. ATIC, based in Abu Dhabu, is GF’s sole owner.

Reports that Abu Dhabi is investigating selling GlobalFoundries has sparked speculation about potential buyers and the future of New York’s largest semiconductor manufacturing facilities.

As reported by ComputerBaseReport, GlobalFoundries owners in Abu Dhabi are seeking a buyer for its 300 mm chip manufacturing plants in Malta, and Hopewell Junction, New York

“Abu Dhabi Advanced Technology Investment (ATIC), may seek and exit a buyer,”  according to an English translation of ComputerBase’s original article in German.

They “simply wants out of the project altogether,” industry watchers have speculated.

According to a second industry report, GlobalFoundries might be “chopped up on the auction block and its businesses sold to specialty foundries that wanted to work in those specific areas.” This according to tech website ExtremeTech which noted, “it’s not clear who would buy the firm’s cutting-edge facility in New York or what the plan for that facility would be. The market for pure-play foundries has been shrinking for decades, with fewer and fewer firms playing in every product generation,”

GlobalFoundries is currently wholly owned by Advanced Technology Investment (ATIC), the investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, in the United Arab Emirates. It is the world’s second largest semiconductor foundry company by revenue.

The company manufactures integrated circuits in high volume mostly for semiconductor companies such as AMD, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and STMicroelectronics. It has five 200 mm wafer fabrication plants in Singapore, one 300 mm plant each in Germany and Singapore, and three plants in the United States, the third being a 200 mm plant in Vermont.

Earlier this month GlobalFoundries announced that it had agreed to sell its Fab 3E in Singapore to Vanguard International Semiconductor (VIS) as part of a broader plan to exit the MEMS business by the end of the year.

 

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