AMD has announced plans to invest up to US$135 million in Ireland over the next four years. The investment is intended to fund a number of strategic R&D initiatives through the addition of up to 290 highly skilled engineering and research positions, as well as a vast array of additional support positions.
The announcement was made in Dublin by Simon Coveney, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and Ruth Cotter, AMD SVP of marketing, communications, and human Resources. The Irish government is supporting the additional investment through IDA Ireland.
"The Irish government, through IDA Ireland, is delighted to support this expansion, further solidifying our commitment to nurturing a vibrant ecosystem for research, development, and engineering," said Coveney in AMD's statement. Also in the same statement, Cotter noted "through this investment, our R&D teams in Ireland will design innovative high-performance and adaptive computing engines to accelerate data centre, networking, 6G communications and embedded solutions while taking a leadership position on artificial intelligence."
Prior to AMD's acquisition of Xilinx in 2022, Xilinx collaborated on multiple occasions with IDA Ireland to advance semiconductor innovation in Ireland. In 2017, Xilinx announced a US$40 million investment to expand its research, development, and engineering operations, as well as to hire over 100 new qualified employees.
"This expansion further strengthens the company's presence in Ireland as a leading centre of semiconductor innovation and puts Ireland at the heart of AMD's European research and engineering operations. IDA Ireland has been proud to support AMD and previously Xilinx for nearly three decades and is committed to supporting investments of scale that impact positively on Europe's semiconductor industry," said Michael Lohan, CEO for IDA Ireland, in AMD's statement.
The Irish site was founded in 1994 as the first purpose-built Xilinx site outside of the US and began operations the following year with a focus on manufacturing, operations support, engineering, and administration services. Since the acquisition of Xilinx, Ireland is now home to one of the largest AMD R&D sites in Europe with a strong record of delivering products with significant commercial success, such as the AMD Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC semiconductor product family, according to the processor vendor.
