AMD has made some 225 requests for such documents as part of its lawsuit against the world’s largest chipmaker for alleged antitrust behavior.
Intel said that what happens between it and its foreign customers is out of bounds to AMD’s US law suit. AMD also has asked for an unreasonably large amount of discovery documents from Intel and its customers, which is expensive and time consuming, according to Intel.
AMD previously filed a motion for Intel to produce documents that AMD claimed contained evidence of Intel’s coercion and other misconduct with its foreign customers. Intel’s alleged shenanigans shut AMD out of revenue opportunities and limited its ability to fairly compete, according to AMD.
But in its filing yesterday, Intel cited a September ruling by a US judge that threw out documents relating to Intel’s foreigners customers based on the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act, which basically puts non-US business dealings beyond US antitrust jurisdiction.
AMD’s claims relating to Intel’s foreign business were a repackaging of an argument that has already been rejected by a US court, Intel claimed, in its filing.
AMD had a different take on the matter. While pending appellate review, that ruling does appear to limit AMD’s damages in its US legal case, it has absolutely nothing to do with the legal and factual merits of the allegations of Intel’s misconduct, said AMD spokesperson Michael Silverman.
Nor does that ruling stand as a bar to AMD’s discovery of evidence that it alleges shows Intel coerced foreign customers from dealing with it, particularly given the harm this foreclosure caused to AMD export business of selling domestically manufactured processors to foreign customers, Silverman said.
What’s more, Intel has good reason to attempt to resist foreign discovery — its desire to keep a US jury seeing the evidence of Intel’s global misconduct and how that has injured consumers in the US, Silverman added.
Intel reckons AMD is being unreasonable.
The parties all agree this is an enormously complex and expensive case, requiring the production of millions of pages of documents, Intel said, in its filing. AMD has estimated that the terabytes of data that will be produced if printed out would extend more than 137 miles.
Among the dozens of Intel customers AMD has subpoenaed are Intel’s foreign customers, including Fujitsu, for documents relating to their business transactions with Intel.
The Japan OEMs and other third parties have made it clear that to comply with the AMD subpoenas would disrupt their business operations and force these companies to incur millions of dollars in expenses to identify, extract, translate, review and product the requested documents, Intel said.
AMD claims Intel’s foreign conduct caused AMD to lose customers and business outside the US, which limited its ability to continue manufacturing chips in the US. Intel countered that AMD would have had to spend about $500m to update its remaining microprocessor factory in the US, because of a copper interconnection technology AMD used for new chips that its older factory was not fitted to handle.
The case is expected to go to trial in 2009.
