More details have emerged on microprocessor maker AMD's data center consolidation plans.

The company's corporate VP for global infrastructure services Tom Painter told PC World that the company is working to reduce the number of its data centers from the current six to three over the next several years as a way to consolidate servers and cut cost.

The company currently has more than 3,000 engineers who use about 115,000 AMD Opteron CPU cores in servers housed at its data centers, according to PC World. It maintains a 90% utilization rate, executing more than 40m computing tasks per month.

In choosing locations for new data centers, tax laws in each location are a major concern for the company. The company uses many electronic design automation (EDA) software tools, and buying software licenses for these often create a large tax expense.

"A lot of governments are looking for ways to exercise their taxing authorities," Painter told PC World. "They want to collect tax on [software] licenses. If you think about the cost of EDA, that's a [major] cost for semiconductor companies."

The company's data centers are set up as a private cloud. AMD engineers execute tasks in real time across a virtual grid of servers across data centers in a number of countries around the world, including US and Malaysia, and the company has found that this cloud-based approach creates efficiencies.

AMD's most recent publicly announced new data center construction project is a 153,000 sq ft build in Suwanee, Georgia. News of the project came out in March.

The company's spokeswoman Pushpita Prasad told DatacenterDynamics in March that the facility would be built out in modules, first of which was scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2012.

Initial construction costs for the first phase were estimated to be between US$25m and $30m.