14 DAY TRIAL // ATIC, the main owner of Globalfoundries, announced recently its plans to delay the construction of its new Fab in Abu Dhabi as the company believes this decision can’t be justified in the current global economic conditions.
"We will not be engaging in any ground breaking in Abu Dhabi in 2012,” said Ibrahim Ajami, ATIC’s CEO, in an interview with The National quoted by Xbit Labs.
“Against the backdrop of a global economy still very volatile, we took a decision from a board level that we should not have another facility right now, but we should assess what happens before the end of 2012 on our growth strategy," concluded the company’s CEO.
The Abu Dhabi fabrication facility that Globalfoundries planned to start constructing in 2012 was supposed to go live in 2015 and would have significantly increased its production capacity.
Right now, the foundry operates two state-of-the-art fabs in Dresden, Germany and New York, USA, and the Abu Dhabi facility was supposed to become the third.
Outside if the uncertainty of the current economic climate, Globalfoundries could also have been influenced by AMD, its main customer, who has become increasingly disappointed with the performance of the foundry.
In fact, some rumors even say that Globalfoundries’ problems with its 28nm HKMG process technology have forced AMD to cancel the Krishna and Wichita APUs, as well as to lose interest in building GPUs on GF’s 28nm node.
Another hypothesis claims that Globalfoundries delayed the Abu Dhabi fab in order to decide whether to use 300mm or 450mm wafers in this new fab, since the semiconductor industry seems to agree that the transition to 450mm is inevitable.
Whatever the reasons behind this decision, Ibrahim Ajami said Globalfoundries and ATIC are still committed to building a fab in Abu Dhabi and that they will decide at the end of 2012 when to restart these plans.