AMD on Wednesday said it would invest up to $135 million over the course of four years in its Xilinx operations in Ireland. The funding will be used to expand R&D and engineering operations at its sites in Dublin and Cork.
AMD indicated that the up to $135 million will be used to fund a number of strategic research and development initiatives, which will involve hiring 290 highly skilled employees in R&D and engineering along with various supporting workers. AMD's description of the strategic R&D initiatives in Ireland is rather vague as the company mentions next generation AI, datacenter, networking, and 6G communications infrastructure, which essentially means the majority of markets served by Xilinx’s adaptive computing solutions, such as FPGAs.
Meanwhile, AMD mentions that a number of Xilinx products, such as the AMD Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC products, were developed in Europe.
"By further investing and expanding our presence in Dublin and Cork, we are committed to continuing to both drive innovation in Ireland and to support the European semiconductor ecosystem," said Ruth Cotter, senior vice president, Marketing, Communications and Human Resources at AMD. "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."
The AMD Xilinx facility in Ireland was originally launched in 1994 and it was the company's first dedicated location outside the United States. The site is dedicated to production, engineering, operational aid, and management. After AMD purchased Xilinx in 2022, the campus in Ireland became one of the company's largest research and development centers in Europe.
"From the cloud and PCs to communications and intelligent end points, AMD’s high-performance and adaptive computing solutions play an increasingly larger role in shaping the future of computing today," added Cotter. "For nearly three decades, Ireland has been a flagship European R&D centre developing adaptive computing solutions, drawing from a strong and highly-skilled workforce."
