Huh? AMD is too important to Intel to let them fail, if AMD ever went broke, Intel would give them money just so they didn't have to deal with every country going at them for anti-trust law violations.
China bypassed US export laws by licensing from AMD and creating a partnership which re-capitalized AMD. China wants to have the fastest and best of everything to show up the United States that China is the new world power.
I've personally met with quite a few AMD employees over the past few years (hell, they bought me quite a bit of alcohol at times :P). They are not trying to compete in the high performance desktop or server arena anymore, they view it as an area that they will never win big marketshare in.
That being said, any market they can compete with Intel and cause them to have less than 100% marketshare in while making money is a market they are in or want to be in if they aren't already.
Intel literally has a half decade of chips that they could release right now that perform better and are ready to be released, but won't be until years down the road due to a desire to remain top dog in the event they have another Pentium 4 happen.
Perhaps that Joint Venture will go as well as Intel Israel went (brought the Core series out, replacing the failed Pentium 4) which then replaced Intel Oregon, but that is an iffy bet. The Israelis are particularly good at critical thinking, whereas that is generally not encouraged in China. I might be wrong though, but 2 to 3 years from now when we see first silicon for their modified Zen, we'll know.
However, being a monopolist makes certain things illegal for you to do, and some of those things are things that are easy to suspect you of, but hard to prove you're not doing.
As such, being a monopolist constrains you, as well as invites long, expensive, frustrating probes into your business that creates costs and risk (even if you're not intentionally violating anti-trust law, doesn't mean some business unit isn't inadvertently doing so).
E.g. IBM was under an anti-trust probe from 1969 until 1982 over their mainframe business. The probe ended with the DOJ concluding the case was without merit, but it is widely considered to have had a big effect on IBMs decisionmaking for more than a decade.
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329517 http://www.pcworld.com/article/2109703/amd-moves-desktop-pc-...