Intel to split off foundary business

westrock2000 said:
I’ll keep the names out of it, but my employer bought a 300mm fab from Intel and we also kept their employees. It’s been a couple years now and the fab still is not at “production” level expectations. This isn’t like a startup fab, it was an existing fab, with existing employees. Our leadership has expressed that the work culture at the fab just is not productive. I have never heard a ex-Intel employee or a tool vendor say they loved Intel or enjoy going there. Usually it’s a long the lines of “people are too afraid to speak up or rock the boat, or try something new”. I’ve interacted with teams over there and individually they seem fine and willing to try things. Maybe Intel leadership just beat the vigor out of the employees. So hopefully we can reinvigorate them. I used to think that my company was dysfunctional and that surely other companies had their act together. But then we got that fab and it’s like yikes, maybe other companies are just as bad, or worse. It’s a great industry, but you have to be open to new ideas & solutions from any level of the workforce.
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That's what happens when you have a virtual monopoly for so long, and money just prints itself. It's not enough to "make money". It's not enough to "Make tons of money"... You need to "Make more money". Shareholders want more. They don't want a number, they want more. And when you already have the full addressable market, the only way to "make more money" is to reduce costs and innovate as slowly as possible. Do the bare minimum and not a single inch more, maximise the distance between "how much effort" and "how much return".

That involves cutting staff, freezing promotions, freezing hiring, only allowing fixed-term contractors, ignoring suggestions for innovation unless they reduce cost.
 
crazycrave said:
The rumor now is the CEO of globalfoundries step down to become the next CEO for Intel.
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Wow that would be the absolute worst.

Back in the Ryzen 1 days, I always called them "GlobalFuckups". as soon as AMD left them behind, it was to the moon and beyond.
 
On paper, spinning off Intel's manufacturing operations to a separate company sounds like a plausible idea. However, significant technological and business barriers will likely prevent this from happening smoothly, if at all.

Intel's semiconductor production fab chain costs around $108 billion (maybe a bit less if we subtract the cost of office buildings and other non-production assets). Finding an investor willing to buy these manufacturing assets for their value will be hard, to put it mildly, as $100 billion M&A transactions are not common.

Of course, it would be easier to persuade a consortium of investors to invest in Intel Foundry if a group of leading American companies would commit to using its services for years to come. However, committing to an unknown Intel Foundry is a huge risk for companies like AMD, Apple, Intel, and Nvidia, as this might slow down their progress and hinder their growth. Something that happened to AMD's commitment to GlobalFoundries back in the day.


https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-i...ose-tsmc-takeover-call-for-intel-fabs-spinoff
 
Splitting a company does not necessarily require selling one or both of them to a new investor.

When GE Healtcare splitted from GE a couple of years ago, stockholder of GE became the owner of the new stocks of that new company (by the ratio of their old GE share), they could do an IPO or sell to someone that do a takeover or a merger in a new company (like HP when they split and enterprise merged with CSC).

It could also be 2 subdivisions of Intel and not 2 different company (GE healthcare was a division a long time before becoming a company)
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Yeah, there were some news rumor posts a few weeks ago that they were considering this. Given their financial situation it does not surprise me.





"Splitting off" doesn't necessarily mean the fabs will turn to shit like they did with Global foundries, but they will likely need some serious investment to be competitive again.

There is something to be said for narrowing ones focus. Both latest node fab development and latest node chip design continue to become more and more complicated, and there is something to be said for being able to focus on one of them without getting distracted by the other.

The question is, can an independent ex Intel Fab business regain the focus and investment it needs to become competitive with the likes of TSMC and Samsung? Or will it b absorbed into some third party and become irrelevant sort of like Globalfoundries?

I have a feeling Uncle Sam might have their hands forced in stepping in and propping up the foundry business, what with all the money that has been provided to Intel under the chips act, and the desire to not be dependent on Taiwan for cutting edge defense tech.

This makes me concerned, but then again, maybe we will be lucky again, and repeat the GM bailout success with the Federal government regaining most of the money it spent to bail out GM in the end.
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Only GM never paid back the money. They took out a second loan to pay the first loan and stiffed the tax payers on the second loan.
Why we do business with communist other than slave labor is beyond me.
I was against, to big to fail but, this is about national security so like all other countries the U.S.A. should bail out Intel; with new management.
 
Semiconductor industry expert. ex AMD, ex Samsung. currently managing a product division at Renesas

Spoke with a senior Intel colleague yesterday. He confirmed that the plan of a foundry spinoff had been discussed extensively in recent months. USFS (United States Foundry Services) might happen within next 12 months. Depends on 14A partnerships and potential investors interest in the new company.​

https://x.com/OmerCheeema/status/1954136601585422610
 
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