AMD Donates $15M In HPC Systems To Fight Coronavirus

'AMD remains focused on providing strong and unwavering support to our employees, customers and the communities around the world we call home,' CEO Lisa Su says in an update about the chipmaker's efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic, protect employees and support relief efforts.

AMD is donating $15 million worth of high-performance computing systems to accelerate research of the novel coronavirus as the chipmaker moves to protect its employees and support various relief efforts.

Lisa Su, AMD's CEO, said in a message Wednesday that the donation is part of the company's new COVID-19 HPC fund that is meant to help research the virus and other diseases. This is on top of the company's new membership in The White House-led COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium and Su's participation in President Donald Trump's new economic revival group.

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"The fund will include an initial donation of $15 million of high-performance systems powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to key research institutions," Su said. "To ease the implementation and speed the useful impact from these donations, we are working with our HPC system provider partners to provide ready-to-install HPC nodes."

To protect the health and financial stability of AMD's employees, Su said the company continues to pay its hourly workers in full regardless of whether they can show up to work and provide enhanced benefits to employees for COVID-19-related testing and treatments as well dependent care reimbursements.

For employees who need to continue to work on site, AMD has instituted health screenings and temperature checks at the entrances of buildings. The company has also established "strict" social distancing procedures and staggered work shifts to reduce higher density of employees.

"As the situation evolves, we will continue to follow guidance on returning employees to work and implement recommended best practices to do so safely," Su said.

As for the company's overall operations, the CEO called AMD's global supply chain "robust" and said the company is supplying products to customers with "minimal disruption."

"We are closely monitoring global events for potential impact on either our manufacturing or partner facilities and adjusting as needed," she said. "We are continuously monitoring logistics and are well positioned to continue executing and partnering closely with our customers to meet their needs."

To help with coronavirus relief efforts, AMD is donating more than $1 million to the Chinese Red Cross Foundation as well as the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and Austin Community Foundation in the United States, among other charities and foundations. The company is also offering to match $1 million in donations from employees for humanitarian efforts.

In addition, AMD has donated hundreds of thousands of masks to medical professionals, and it's prioritizing shipments of AMD embedded processors and other products used in ventilators and respirators among other devices used by medical customers.

"AMD remains focused on providing strong and unwavering support to our employees, customers and the communities around the world we call home," Su said. "We look forward to continued partnership and shared resilience as we persevere and become a stronger global community."