Armonk: IBM is paying $1.5 billion to Globalfoundries in order to shed its costly chip division.
IBM will make payments to the chipmaker over three years, but it will take a $4.7 billion charge in the third quarter when it reports results Monday.
Privately held Globalfoundries will get IBM's global commercial semiconductor technology business, including intellectual property and technologies related to IBM Microelectronics. It also gets IBM's semiconductor manufacturing operations and plants in East Fishkill, New York and Essex Junction, Vermont, as well as access to thousands of patents and IBM's commercial microelectronics business.
Globalfoundries said that it plans to employ substantially all IBM workers at the East Fishkill and Essex Junction plants, except for a team of semiconductor server group employees who will stay with IBM.
Under the agreement, Globalfoundries will become IBM's exclusive server processor semiconductor technology provider for 22 nanometer (nm), 14nm and 10nm semiconductors for the next 10 years.
IBM said that the transaction will allow it to concentrate on fundamental semiconductor research and the development of future cloud, mobile, big data analytics, and secure transaction-optimized systems.
Shares of International Business Machines Corp., based in Armonk, rose slightly in premarket trading.
