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 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?

Absolutely Fabless

If it’s true that “real men have fabs,” as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Chairman W. J. “Jerry” Sanders III once said, then AMD is the semiconductor industry’s latest eunuch. This morning the chipmaker said it will spin off its manufacturing operations, splitting itself into two companies–one to design chips and one to make them.