A Candid Conversation with the GlobalFoundries CEO!

By SemiWiki

July 27, 2015

I did not know Dr. Sanjay Jha prior to this meeting but I certainly knew of him from his time at Qualcomm. It seemed a bit odd for me to fly to Dresden to meet a man that is based here in Silicon Valley but that made the meeting all that more interesting. Especially after finding out the German Chancellor Angela Merkel would also be visiting Fab 1, absolutely.

While at Qualcomm Sanjay was known as a technically brilliant man with exemplary business skills to which I agree whole heartedly. After 20 years at Qualcomm, which started in design and ended in the executive ranks, Sanjay joined Motorola as CO-CEO and spun out the mobility division which he later sold to Google for a whopping $12.5B. The next time I heard Sanjay’s name was on the short list for the next Intel CEO which I think would have been an excellent choice. That position of course went to an Intel insider (Brian Krzanich) and much to my surprise and great pleasure Sanjay joined GlobalFoundries. Knowing what I do about him I expected great things but I never would have expected the acquisition of the IBM semiconductor division. Not only did GF acquire it, they got paid $1.5B! Talk about the epic deal of the century!

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