AMD extends agreement with GlobalFoundries to purchase 12nm and 14nm wafers

AMD has extended its agreement with GlobalFoundries for one year, until 2025. The company will purchase 1.85 billion euros worth of 12nm and 14nm wafers from the manufacturer in the coming years. Those wafers are currently used for I/O dies in Ryzen CPUs.

AMD recently filed the extension with the US SEC, in which the company reports that “certain terms” of its supply agreement with GlobalFoundries have been amended. The new agreement will run until December 31, 2025, where the previous agreement would end at the end of 2024.

This grant will also increase the total amount AMD will spend at GlobalFoundries in the coming years. AMD will purchase approximately $2.1 billion worth of wafers from the semiconductor manufacturer over the next four years. AMD is also free to purchase 12nm and 14nm wafers from other manufacturers. Under the previous May agreement, the mandatory purchase amount was $1.6 billion.

GlobalFoundries is the former semiconductor division of AMD. The latter divested that division in 2009, after which GlobalFoundries continued as an independent company and became AMD’s chip supplier. However, GlobalFoundries decided in 2018 to stop developing more advanced processes and to focus on 12nm and 14nm production.

AMD then switched to TSMC for more advanced chip production at 7nm and smaller, for example for the Zen cores in the current Ryzen and EPYC CPUs. AMD does not disclose how the 12nm and 14nm wafers will be used in the future, but currently these nodes from GlobalFoundries are still used for the i/o dies of AMD’s processors. Anandtech writes that the reserved wafers will not be used for products from Xilinx, an fpga manufacturer that is being acquired by AMD.