AMD plans to buy around $2.1 billion of silicon wafers from GlobalFoundries from 2022 through 2025.
The new contract amends an existing deal, adding $500 million and another year to the agreement.
Chipmaker GlobalFoundries was spun off from AMD in 2009, and soon expanded with the acquisition of Chartered Semiconductor and most of IBM’s fab business in 2015 (with the latter deal part of an ongoing lawsuit).
In 2018, GlobalFoundries said that it would cut back on less profitable fabs and abandon cutting-edge and prohibitively expensive 7nm and 10nm chips.
This has proved successful for the company, with its larger node chips proving popular and profitable in the mobile, IoT, defense, and automotive sectors.
AMD uses the chipmaker for early-generation Ryzen products and the I/O dies for AMD’s current-generation Ryzen and Epyc CPUs.
For below 12nm products, AMD uses rival foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
However, with the ongoing chip shortage limiting foundry supply, AMD may be looking elsewhere.
For the upcoming TSMC process node, Apple is thought to have secured a large chunk of TSMC’s supply, and receives special treatment.
In November, Taiwanese tech publication Digitimes claimed that this has led to AMD now considering turning to Samsung for 3nm chip manufacturing.
Source: datacenterdynamics.com
