Intel on Friday broke floor on two new factories in Arizona as a part of its turnaround plan to grow to be a serious producer of chips for outdoor prospects.
The $20 billion vegetation — dubbed Fab 52 and Fab 62 — will convey the whole variety of Intel factories at its campus in Chandler, Arizona, to 6. They’ll home Intel’s most superior chipmaking expertise and play a central position within the Santa Clara, California-based firm’s effort to regain its lead in making the smallest, quickest chips by 2025, after having fallen behind rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.
The brand new Arizona vegetation will even be the primary Intel has constructed from the bottom up with house reserved for outdoor prospects. Intel has lengthy made its personal chips, however its turnaround plan requires taking over work for outsiders equivalent to Qualcomm, Amazon.com’s cloud unit, in addition to deepening its manufacturing relationship with the US army.
“We need to have extra resilience to the provision chain,” Intel Chief Government Pat Gelsinger, who earlier within the week attended a White Home assembly on the worldwide chip scarcity, instructed Reuters in an interview. “As the one firm on US soil that may do probably the most superior lithography processes on the earth, we’re going to step up in an enormous means.”
Gelsinger stated it was too early to say how a lot of the brand new vegetation’ capability can be reserved for outdoor prospects. He stated the vegetation would produce “1000’s” of wafers per week.
Wafers are the silicon discs on which chips are made, and every can maintain lots of and even 1000’s of chips.
Intel rival TSMC has additionally bought land to construct its first US campus in Phoenix, not removed from Intel’s location, the place TSMC plans as much as six chip factories , Reuters beforehand reported.
Gelsinger stated Intel plans to announce one other US campus web site earlier than the top of the yr that can ultimately maintain eight chip factories.
© Thomson Reuters 2021
