A report that came out recently hinted that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is thinking of vacating its present headquarters and move to another location.

The 319,000-square-foot campus in Sunnyvale, California has been home for AMD for a number of years, but AMD may be forced to vacate its premises in the near future.

Reliable sources said that a developer, Irvine Company, is looking to buy the property. Other sources in the real estate industry say this company could build hundreds of apartments on the site.

AMD does not own the site where its campus now sits. It only leases the place from W.P. Carey, a New York-based real estate investment trust. W.P. bought the place in 1995 for $95 million. The lease of the chipmaker ends in December 2018, but it has a renewal option of two 10-year terms.

While the Irvine Company is in contract to buy the 32.5 acre site, AMD is trying to look for a space it can lease with an area from 175,000 to 225,000 square feet elsewhere in Silicon Valley. This area is approximately 30 percent to 45 percent less than the space it now occupies.

With this move to a smaller facility, the chipmaker hopes to save some cash. Based on its business license for 2016, the chipmaker employs 559 workers in its Sunnyvale headquarters where it has been since 1977.

It does not want to leave Silicon Valley so when its lease expires in 2018, it still wants to stay in the same general location it did for almost 4 decades.

The reduction in office space emphasizes the shrinking business of the once-profitable rival of Intel. Its less than 600 workers at present is a far cry from the 2,000 employees it had in its heyday.

But not all is dark though since AMD finished last week with a bang. Its stock value soared due to the news that its x86 chip technology had been licensed to a Chinese consortium of private and public companies.