Yeah frankly it's a little misleading to frame this as "AMD won this", this is a gimmie contract to keep them in the game. The DoE is throwing gimmie contract

Yeah frankly it's a little misleading to frame this as "AMD won this", this is a gimmie contract to keep them in the game. The DoE is throwing gimmie contracts to Intel too for Xe and they haven't even produced a working product yet. Their CPUs pretty much fall into the same boat too - is it justifiable to buy Intel CPUs right now for HPC applications, especially with AMD supporting AVX-512 with their Zen4 chips (which are the counterparts to the Sapphire Rapids DoE is buying)? Not really but their interests are in keeping Intel in the game, an AMD monoculture doesn't benefit anyone anymore than an Intel monoculture did. Although of course this is not fab-related, it's the same basic strategy - the US wants as diverse and thriving a tech ecosystem as they can get in the west, and particularly in the US, to counterbalance a rising China. Not that China is anywhere close today, but in the 20-year timeframe it's a major concern.