GlobalFoundries has received approval from the federal government to acquire IBM Microelectronics, the company said in a news release.
The acquisition includes IBM’s global commercial semiconductor technology business, 16,000 patents, three facilities in the Northeast and 8,000 employees.
GlobalFoundries announced Wednesday morning that the deal had been finalized.
IBM is paying GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion over three years to take over chip manufacturing operations in Vermont, and Malta and East Fishkill, New York.
IBM has had a plant in Essex Junction since 1957 and has been a key driver of the economic growth of Chittenden County and the state. The chip-making facility employs about 4,000 workers.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an inter-agency committee overseen by the U.S. Treasury secretary, approved the GlobalFoundries and IBM deal Monday.
GlobalFoundries is owned by the Mubadala Development Co., an investment company owned by the government of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
Under the terms of the sale announced in October, GlobalFoundries said it “plans to acquire IBM’s global commercial semiconductor technology business, including intellectual property, world-class technologists and technologies related to IBM Microelectronics, subject to completion of applicable regulatory reviews. GlobalFoundries will also become IBM’s exclusive server processor semiconductor technology provider for 22 nanometer (nm), 14nm and 10nm semiconductors for the next 10 years,” according to a news release.
The spinoff of the microelectronics division enables IBM to “further focus on fundamental semiconductor research and the development of future cloud, mobile, big data analytics, and secure transaction-optimized systems.”
IBM will continue a $3 billion investment in semiconductor research for “next generation” computing. GlobalFoundries will have “primary access” to the research through a joint collaboration with the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany, N.Y., according to the news release.
