AMD To Cut Roughly 500 Jobs and Outsource Development Services

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) revealed Thursday that it plans to cut 5% of its workforce in a restructuring. AMD had about 9,700 employees at the end of last year, according to its latest annual filing from February. That means the chip maker is going to be cutting back its workforce by 500 jobs, or about 5 percent, and take a total restructuring charge of $42 million. AMD expects to save about $58 million next year as a result of the cuts.

The one interesting thing that we found in the restructuring details is that AMD plans on outsourcing certain IT and application development services. AMD employees have to be emotionally drained by all the cuts they have had over the past five or so years and now they are learning that some development is being outsourced. AMD has been struggling to compete with Intel in the semiconductor business and has been losing market share to Intel in both the PC and server markets.

Update 10/02/2015 3:15pm CT: AMD reached out and let us know that the outsourced software development is all IT related and that it means that things like SharePoint programming is being outsourced. It is not the engineering teams working on drivers or any software that s used by our customers or end users.