Senior management at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will decide by the end of the year whether the company will break ground in the spring for a $3.2 billion semiconductor fabrication plant in upstate New York or will defer the groundbreaking.

I doubt that anyone will argue that AMD is currently in a pretty difficult financial situation. AMD was forced to print more stock in order to pay back the loan they took to purchase ATI last year. German government has recently promised to allocate some budget for reconstruction of AMD Dresden fabs. The situation with the construction of the new Fab 4x in upstate New York, US is not completely clear yet. At this time the company officials prefer to claim that they still have time to make the final decision until July 2009.

AMD "has until July 2009 to decide whether to proceed with the project. After that, $1.2 billion in state incentives will expire," according to the report on Albany Times Union web-site.

If the constructions of Fab 4X starts eventually, by 2011-2012 this fab will be manufacturing AMD processors. Hopefully the company will be feeling better by then and will not require any additional financial help for further increase of production capacities.