Make that check out to Neelie Kroes

“Oh, my God.” That was what I said when I walked into the Hoover’s newsroom this morning, glanced up at a TV set, and saw the news on CNBC that the European Commission fined Intel about $1.44 billion, its biggest antitrust penalty ever.

The champagne undoubtedly will flow at One AMD Place today as a result. AMD brought three complaints against Intel to the European Commission, which oversees antitrust regulations for the European Union countries.

Among other charges, the commission held that Intel paid illicit rebates to computer manufacturers to use only Intel processors in their products, and not AMD’s competing processors. It said the companies involved were Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and NEC, which are among the world leaders in the PC market. (BTW, Neelie Kroes is Europe’s competition commissioner, and no, she doesn’t get to keep the money from EC fines.)

Intel immediately issued a statement denying the EC’s charges and said it would appeal. The chip maker is a big and wealthy company, but even for them, more than a billion euros is a big deal.

Look for AMD to crow about the EC fine on this Web site today. While it’s a big legal victory for the chip company, AMD won’t see a dime from that penalty. And it will be back to the grind of competing in this recessionary environment tomorrow.