AMD Responds to WSJ ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ Story (opens in new tab)

A story or rumour affecting the short term price of a company stock, might leave little recourse to the company, as that price can return back to what it was relatively quickly. There would have been some reputation damage, but I wouldn't weigh stock price to be a good measure of that.

If the company was maybe in the middle of raising funds, say bonds from the market, or using additional shares; they would have stronger case if the false story hindered such find raising.

A company is often not affected by short-term fluctuations in its external "value".

If in the other hand, there's an investor who was adversely affected by such news, the stock price directly affects them. Perhaps they would have a stronger case.

This is my opinion based on my intuition.

However if the press demonstrates that they followed reasonable journalistic practices and weren’t blatantly lying, they’d be fine.

The gist of the story wasn't just that a lot was shared; it was that it was shared nefariously, borderline illegally, and it was all AMD's fault and intention. It essentially painted them as mercenary traitors.

I admit, the original story does sound bad. But I'm also aware of how easy it is to paint such a picture, ando find it hard to believe the US Government couldn't have shut this down if it really wanted to.

AMD is saying that a) the IP was not of the highest value or performance, and b) it's unlikely to go against American national security interests when DoC and DoJ both give explicit sign-off. Remember too that this was in the Obama era, when the likelihood of sailing the country down a river for $$$ was lower.

Whatever. If they really did unzip for the Chinese military as the WSJ claims then AMD will soon find itself competing with Chinese government subsidized derivatives of their IP and have next to no meaningful recourse with any governing authority.

Otherwise they would not have a single chance to bring in anybody of an anymuch high calibre to China

This is so painfully obvious it's sad that it has to be said out loud. There is no credible information about exactly what AMD means when they claim lower performance. Nothing meaningful is said about the nature of their 'protections.' And the fact that everything was supposedly blessed by all the various US government TLAs under the Obama administration is almost a confirmation of the WSJ lede; that this was yet another backdoor sellout of US tech to China.