This is very smart. Some may remember about 15 years ago that Texas Instruments built a new wafer fab right at its Dallas HQ - this was entirely to avoid IP theft of the sort going on in overseas fabs. What POET will be giving Wavetech to manufacture will be (I suppose) the finished mask information, not the recipe for generating that mask, so that part of their production chain won't be a problem.

Which now makes me wonder: since POET has jettisoned licensing in favor of producing their own, what becomes of the PDKs that had been developed and released to others (Synopsis?).