Finance History | 901 Thompson Place — One Hundred Thousand Dollars and Eight Men from Fairchild

People treat AMD as a Santa Clara campus and a later rival in the S and P 500.

The first permanent plant stood on this Sunnyvale street.

On 1 May 1969 Jerry Sanders and seven other engineers from Fairchild Semiconductor incorporated Advanced Micro Devices. Company histories record starting capital of 100,000 dollars in 1969 currency.

Sanders had been Fairchild's director of worldwide marketing. He joined on the condition that he become president.

The first weeks were spent in a founder's living room, then in two rooms behind a rug-cutting shop in Santa Clara.

By September 1969 the firm had moved into 901 Thompson Place, not far from the other Fairchild spin-outs along the Valley's south edge.

The first products were logic chips sold as second sources. Proprietary designs came later.

On 27 September 1972 AMD sold 620,000 common shares over the counter at 15.50 dollars a share and raised 7.5 million dollars. The company later listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1979 and moved its listing to Nasdaq in 2015.

The two Thompson Place buildings were used for design and fabrication into the early 1990s. They were demolished in 2006. A self-storage warehouse at 875 East Arques Avenue now covers the footprint.

Groundwater cleanup from the fabrication years continues under federal oversight. The pin is the historical address, visible from the public street. Do not enter the lot.

The mechanism is a second-source house that learned to design its own silicon because the first customer contracts were copies.

Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. One AMD Place in Sunnyvale, the later campus that replaced Thompson Place. No rights-clear photograph of the 1969 buildings remains on Commons.