Abu Dhabi's Ambitions for Chip Manufacturing Hub

Over the last three decades, players in the cutthroat semiconductor industry have watched chip production move from the U.S. and Japan to South Korea, and then to Singapore and Taiwan. They’ve also witnessed over the past few years production move slowly to low-cost places like China where even chip giant Intel (INTC) took a big gamble and set up an advanced manufacturing base in Dalian. But now, oil-rich United Arab Emirates wants in on some of the action with its ambitious plan to build a chip manufacturing hub in the country by 2030. Could it succeed?

Abu Dhabi government-owned Advanced Technology Investment Co., known as ATIC, last year bought Singapore-based contract chip maker Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing for $1.8 billion in cash and merged it with Globalfoundries, a company spun off from microchip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and jointly owned by AMD and ATIC. Globalfoundries, with operations spanning three continents, is now the world’s third-largest contract chip maker behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and United Microelectronics of Taiwan. But it’s not happy at being No. 3.

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