AMD Move: Discuss Amongst Y’alls Selves
The back-and-forth between AMD and its critics continues. Last week, AMD issued an email justifying its move to Southwest Parkway under the aegis of environmental stewardship and traffic reduction. Yesterday, the folks at Austin Action responded in kind by deconstructing AMD’s rationale.
The gist of the discussion is that AMD’s claims may be overstated (environmental and water quality sensitivity) or unsupported (traffic abatement), but nor are they outright fabrications. While this move is self-serving, it should be recognized that AMD is taking steps to moderate their impact over and above what other development efforts have and will continue to do. Whether these are sufficient to protect the long-term health of Barton Creek and the surrounding areas is uncertain, although it certainly increases the risks for degradation.
This issue also raises a number of questions in my mind that have yet to be addressed publicly by AMD, the City of Austin, or other interested parties.
- What’s happening to the current AMD campus(es)? The Spansion spin-off will likely stay east, but what about the other buildings? Are we going to have yet another under-utilized business / industrial park sitting around while everyone scrambles to pave the recharge zones? It seems reasonable to tie western development with assured usage of existing facilities.
- Once upon a time, the city was successful encouraging east side development. But plopping down facilities doesn’t help if all the employees live west and ultimately insist that their latest big penis project get built closer to 1022 McMansion Lane. Doesn’t this demonstrate an abject failure of the city’s economic development vision for East Austin, or complete lack of one?
- Why didn’t AMD take over the Intel skeleton? It’s more central than either old or new locations, and who wouldn’t love the PR coup of rejeuvenating a symbol of your competitor’s failure?
- Is this really a sound business decision? Surely a company like AMD who: a) operates in an intensely competitive environment with shrinking margins; b) is outspent on R&D and marketing by orders of magnitude by Intel; and c) only recently reversed years of losses, has better things to invest in than an executive suite in the hills?
- What is Austin Action’s response to the AMD / Stratus proposal to invest $5 million in open space? I’m as suspicious as anyone of such developer-led initiatives, but it seems like a reasonable opportunity to protect land resources.