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22.07.2023 08:36, Alexey Razin
AMD CEO Lisa Su spent this week traveling around Asia, and if at the beginning of the week she spoke in the capital of Taiwan, then by the end she reached the Japanese capital, where in an interview with local media she admitted that the need to diversify risks pushes the company to look not only at TSMC enterprises outside Taiwan, but also at the services of its competitors.
Image Source: AMD
The last statement sounded quite intriguing, given the comments made in Taiwan by Lisa Su a few days earlier about the need to maintain cooperation with “good partners” like TSMC to produce advanced components using state-of-the-art lithography. In an interview with the publication Nikkei Asian Review The head of AMD during her visit to Tokyo made the following explanations regarding the prospects for cooperation with TSMC: “The company is looking at other manufacturing options to ensure it has the most reliable supply chain. In the field of developing advanced chips, we have no alternatives in our plans.”.
In other words, AMD understands the importance of cooperation with TSMC in the field of advanced chip manufacturing and packaging technologies, but in secondary areas it is ready to consider alternative suppliers. In fact, AMD initially partnered with GlobalFoundries, receiving 12nm and 14nm crystals from it to this day. When AMD’s graphics division was an independent company from ATI Technologies, it received some of its products from the Taiwanese UMC. In principle, in the contract direction, AMD in this case still has alternatives in the form of Samsung Electronics or even Intel, but for the latter it is a direct competitor, and therefore it is extremely difficult to imagine their cooperation in this area – even taking into account the potential openness of Intel towards this idea. Note that Lisa Su did not specify in an interview with Japanese media which of the contract manufacturers she would like to see among her partners, in addition to TSMC. At the same time, the head of the company this week, in fact, denied rumors about AMD’s intentions to switch to Samsung’s services in the production of advanced chips during his speech in Taiwan.
But the head of AMD did not hide his interest in cooperation with TSMC in the context of the emergence of new enterprises of the latter outside Taiwan: “The emergence of new production sites around the world, including the US and Japan, I think this is very good. We would like to use production sites in different geographic locations to achieve greater flexibility.”. Recall that AMD management did not hide their interest in obtaining chips from TSMC enterprises currently under construction in Arizona.
It is difficult to predict what AMD can come up with in this sense, taking into account the imminent appearance of a new TSMC enterprise in western Japan. In the interests of Sony and automotive component supplier Denso, which are shareholders of a joint venture with TSMC, 12nm, 16nm, 28nm and 22nm chips will be produced here starting next year. If AMD has an interest in localizing such a range of products in Japan, then the local TSMC enterprise will certainly come in handy in this sense.
2023-07-22 05:36:00
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