2023-08-16 14:06:48
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Intel announced in February last year to acquire Tower Semiconductor, an Israeli wafer foundry, for $5.4 billion, but the deal has now officially fell through.Earlier Intel issuedannouncementIt said it had terminated the acquisition, citing failure to “obtain timely regulatory approvals required by the merger agreement.”according toBloombergAccording to the report, the resistance seems to come mainly from the Chinese government. After losing Tower, Intel may need to find another way to expand its foundry business to compete with rivals such as TSMC.
Tower Semiconductor bought Jazz Semiconductor in the United States in 2008 and Micron’s fab in Japan in 2011. Then in 2014, they formed a wafer manufacturing company with Panasonic, and then in 2016, they once once more acquired Maxim’s wafer fab in Texas. These experiences have enabled Tower to have factories in Israel, California, Texas, Japan and other places, capable of manufacturing 6-inch, 8-inch, and 12-inch wafers with various processes, and supplying many types of chips.
In fact, before Intel announced the acquisition of Tower Semiconductor, there were rumors that they planned to spend $30 billion to buy GlobalFoundries (split from AMD) and other chip factories. It has also been actively promoting the plant construction plan. At the beginning of last year, they revealed that they would spend 20 billion US dollars to build “the largest chip manufacturing plant on earth” in Ohio, USA.
As part of the agreement, Intel, which terminated the acquisition, will pay Tower a $353 million breakup fee. However, they emphasized that they will still implement the original roadmap, striving to “maintain the leading position in transistor performance and power consumption control by 2025”, and aim to “become the world’s second largest external foundry by 2030”.
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