Apple has come to an agreement with GT Advanced Technologies to release it from a loan the tech giant gave the company in a failed bid to turn GT into a sapphire screen supplier for its popular iPhone devices, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Under the terms of the deal, GT will hold an auction this month to sell some of its equipment from the venture and will split the proceeds with Apple. Any equipment not sold in the auction – apart from the up to 600 sapphire furnaces GT intends to keep – will revert to Apple, which will then scrap the equipment and pardon the remainder of the $439 million loan it made to GT in 2013.
The move marks a step to bring Apple closure in a saga that began with a plan to open a factory in Arizona to produce super-hard sapphire iPhone screens and took a sharp dive with GT’s surprise bankruptcy filing in October 2014.
According to previous reports, GT spent $900 million to get the sapphire factory up and running, but from the start faced only problems – from defective sapphire cylinders to employee management issues and financial difficulties. The bankruptcy filing, however, was a blow to Apple, while GT’s stock rating collapsed following the news and decimated the company’s $1.4 billion market value.
In February, Apple announced a $2-billion, 10-year plan to turn the failed facility into a massive data center. Approximately 150 permanent workers are expected to have a home at site, in addition to the 600 engineering and construction workers who will retrofit the building. Work is expected to begin by late 2016.