Chip fab builder moving here

Company constructing Malta ”fabs” to move headquarters from Texas to Watervliet

By LARRY RULISON, Business writer
First published in print: Tuesday, February 9, 2010

ALBANY — M+W U.S. Inc., the firm building GlobalFoundries Inc.’s $4.2 billion computer chip factory in Saratoga County, plans to relocate its corporate headquarters from the Dallas area to the Watervliet Arsenal.

The move, which will be announced this morning at the University at Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, will bring 190 M+W jobs to the arsenal. M+W already has offices at the school and the arsenal that together employ about 70 people.

The deal was brokered by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Assembly Majority Leader Ronald Canestrari and will require $6.5 million in state funds to renovate office space at the arsenal. M+W has committed to spending $228.5 million on its arsenal over the next five years.

“It’s a significant thing at a time when everyone is talking about economic development and job creation,” Silver said. “This will actually do it.”

M+W U.S. is part of M+W Group, formerly known as M+W Zander, which is part of the Stumpf Group, an industrial and real estate conglomerate based in Austria.

M+W has built chip fabs all around the world, including IBM Corp.’s factory in East Fishkill. It also built the NanoCollege’s $5 billion Albany NanoTech complex on Fuller Road.

And it built two factories that GlobalFoundries runs in Dresden, Germany, that used to be owned by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The two fabs, as well as the New York project at the Luther Forest Technology Campus in Malta, were spun off as part of a joint venture between AMD and the Advanced Technology Investment Co., a company owned by the government of Abu Dhabi. M+W Group also has opened an office in Abu Dhabi in anticipation of GlobalFoundries building fabs there.

Rick Whitney, the chief executive officer of M+W U.S., frequently travels between the Dallas area and a home he has in Saratoga Springs to keep a watchful eye on the GlobalFoundries project, known as Fab 8.

Texas, especially Dallas and Austin, has been one of the major semiconductor centers in the United States, which is why M+W located its domestic headquarters there.

The GlobalFoundries plant in Malta is the only new computer chip factory being built in the United States.

Chip companies like AMD, which is based in Austin, and Texas Instruments, which is based outside Dallas, have been moving to a “fabless” model in which companies outsource expensive manufacturing to foundries that do only contract manufacturing.

GlobalFoundries was created to take advantage of this emerging business model, and the company has since moved to try and gobble up as much of the market as possible by signing up new customers and buying the world’s third-largest foundry company, Chartered Semiconductor of Singapore.

GlobalFoundries has room for two additional fabs at its site at Luther Forest. If GlobalFoundries does well, M+W could potentially have work here for decades.

Rulison can be reached at 454-5504 or lrulison@timesunion.com

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