AMD starts spending Intel’s money to improve business ops

AMD announced this week that it will offer up to $1B to holders of Senior Debt from the company due in 2012, in large part with Intel money

AMD intends to finance the purchase of the notes tendered in the tender offer with the net proceeds from the closing of AMD’s private offering of $500,000,000 aggregate principal amount of senior notes due 2017 (the “New Notes Offering”), which was separately announced by AMD today, and from the receipt of the $1.25 billion cash payment (the “Settlement Payment”) from Intel Corporation pursuant to the Company’s recently announced settlement agreement with Intel.

Clearing up debt is a Good Thing, and we’ve been immensely positive about Cray’s ability to take advantage of the financial crisis to become essentially debt free. But AMD’s technologies now lag behind Intel’s in the market (in HPC, Intel has 80.4% of the Top500 to AMD’s 8.4%, a dramatic shift in the list) and I’m left to wonder whether that money would have been better spent elsewhere.