The tech company AMD has been accused of feeding the very sensitive technology to China, and the company even isn’t having any of it. The accusation made by the chip designer has rejected the Wall Street Journal claims, that the partnerships formed in early 2016, improperly or illegally shared the “x86 CPU” tech with the firm Sugon Information Industry, a super-computer maker company backed by Chinese government.
The sources talking to Wall Street Journal alleged that AMD had created a “complex structure” between the two joint ventures, in order to bypass the American rules, with the Defense and Commerce Departments, both are now raising concerns that these arrangement actually threatened the national security. But when asked AMD, the company told a quite different story.
About the Sugon deal, the company claimed that it “diligently and proactively” told Commerce and Defense Departments plus other agencies, and that there were “no objections whatsoever” to either the joint ventures or on the matter of technology handover. On this matter, AMD further argued, the report also left out the significant details, such as “significant protections” put in place in order to prevent the China from obtaining the valuable tech. The report by WSJ also noted that AMD removed the encryption from the hardware design, it had offered to China.
As far as the benefits are concerned, AMD benefited least from the partnerships. The accumulation of licensing fees and royalties, netted the company to pay about $293 million, while also pushing the company to sell a majority stake in its Malaysia and China factories to a government-supported investment fund, that generated another $371 million. All these were notable windfalls at a time, when AMD was struggling to compete with NVIDIA and Intel and now its also putting pressure on both through its latest range of CPUs and GPUs.
