How AMD Gave China the ‘Keys to the Kingdom’
I have worked for certain major semiconductor companies. At least two of them.<p>The question is not “Why did AMD hand over all its IP to China,” the question is “Why did our incompetent government allow this to happen and why did they turn a blind eye to the strong arming that was going on?”<p>A further question is: “Why did only some (always smaller) tech companies fork over the IP while very large ones did not?”<p>Let me tell you a story about a fab in a distant country that begins with a C. The rumor was that it was a very expensive server fab. One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing. They locked down the factory for 48 hours and brought in a search team, scoured the building from bottom to top and then found nothing.<p>Then, as if by magic, the wafer appeared three feet away from where it went missing. Industrial espionage. And that is what you get when you are big.<p>What happens when you are small? They put a gun to your head (metaphorically) and say “Split off a company and hand it over to entities controlled by the Chinese government. All your IP will be shared with them. They will own the market in China and send you a royalty check and have the ability to modify your IP to build custom products. If you don’t like it, fuck off, no China for you.”<p>What lazy, incompetent and useless western journalists have been shockingly non curious about is why certain companies like Microsoft and Apple magically don’t seem to get this treatment.<p>It is almost as though....some other arrangement was getting made. No lazy western journalists to my knowledge have yet bothered to investigate why it is that Intel, Microsoft etc have not been forced to do these IP sharing agreements while AMD and others have.<p>One day, Lazy western journalists might be curious and get off their asses from
Covering trump but somehow I doubt it.<p>Blaming AMD for “handing over the keys” is fucking stupid. It is the United States government’s lack of a spinal cord that is the problem. These companies had no choice. Either play the game or get shut out of the market.<p>Bad journalism, everywhere along with a lack of curiosity.