I'm pretty sure the writer didn't take a look at the Foundry 2.0 Model which might have given him some insight into the Plan that Ajit may be orchestrating.

This exert from Foundry 2.0 would have addressed a number of his points.

"One of the key problems with Foundry 1.1 was that short-term profit got in the way of partnering for long-term gain. Foundry 2.0 overcomes this limitation by enforcing Bruck’s rule that "partnering only occurs when common interest rises above proprietary interest" fully down the command chain. This is not as easy as it sounds because every link in that chain needs to think like a customer, which builds trust. Trust is what makes customer and supplier willing to go long on profit together by maximizing the partnership and never sacrificing it for short-term cost gains.

Foundry 2.0 is not business as usual with a new name. Trust breakdowns between organizations are like a cancer, were things go wrong at small unseen sites and then metastasize throughout the relationship. So Foundry 2.0 requires a different culture. Foundry 2.0 is a way of doing business.

To pull this off Ajit Manocha had to build operational platforms and processes to be Foundry 2.0 compliant. One simply can’t say you’re going to think like one company. You have to build it into the organization so it becomes second nature. Manocha started by gluing together the disparate IDM culture of the old AMD manufacturing group and the Foundry 1.0/1.1 culture of Chartered. When he started, these two parts were largely functioning as two companies. As he integrated them, he also embedded trust building into GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ infrastructure by assembling a leadership team with backgrounds from wafer processing, foundries, IDMs, & Fabless companies. These people had similar frustrations with how the foundry model had evolved and backgrounds to understand how to overcome many of the day-to-day road blocks that undermine trust.

Having done this, Ajit restructured the company to create what he calls "Mini-IDMs." His innovation is to move the sales-buyer relationship up to the corporate level, thereby removing this wall separating fabless designers from foundry FTSs, and process engineers in the Foundry 1.1 model. This allows them to execute decisions like they are a single company.

Can Foundry 2.0 really drive change? The pressures that created Foundry 1.1 still exist. But the difference today is that it is the fabless companies who see the need for change the most. Markets change far faster when customers pull than when vendors push.

Foundry 2.0 has already seen significant successes at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Those working under it note that getting a design to market is more like working together as two internal departments with a common goal, instead of Foundry 1.1’s model of two independent companies with independent focus on profit share. Working together is not encumbered by having to go up through procurement over to sales and down; and then return back through this torturous path. "