Intel is building the largest chip manufacturing facility in the world near New Albany Ohio. I think this is encouraging news.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone...Zzmk?ocid=uxbndlbing

Well, there were billions in one of those covid stimulus packages to help pay for US chip manufacturing, wonder how that works?

Like other handouts, the company applies per whatever regulatory requirements are set, and Uncle Sam sends the check. Like, universities with millions in trust applying for a few million more in Covid funds.

It would be nice to see if they are going to have a specific line or two set up for automotive applications, cell phones, and other consumer electronics.

I hope they are building chips for my next truck.

They are claiming that it will be operational in 2025. That's pretty quick in my opinion.

Jim

Will this fab be just for Intel designs, or will they turnkey anybody’s chips? If the former, I don’t think they should have public money to build the facility.

18 months to make a chip. Time to build the facility. Gonna be awhile. They are getting lots of governmental incentives.

quote:

Originally posted by 4MUL8R:
I hope they are building chips for my next truck.

I read that any new manufacturing will have limited impact to the automotive industry as they are different (newer faster better) than what automobiles use (older design).

But it's still great to hear IMO.

I think this is very good news

https://www.breitbart.com/tech...ctory-on-the-planet/

Computer chip maker Intel will reportedly be investing $20 billion to develop a new chip manufacturing site in New Albany, Ohio. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told TIME in an interview that the chipmaker expects the location to become “the largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet,” adding that the plant could expand to 2,000 acres. Gelsinger said that the new site could become the “Silicon Heartland.”

Intel is investing as much as $100 billion in the site over the next ten years and around $100 million as part of partnerships with Ohio universities, colleges, and the U.S. National Science Foundation to foster new talent.

Intel has multiple factories in the U.S. already, including in Oregon, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Ohio facility will be the first manufacturing expansion by Intel into a new state in over 40 years

Intel has been massively increasing its investments in manufacturing capacity under the company’s new CEO, who previously announced a $20 billion expansion of the firm’s current Arizona complex.

Breitbart News previously reported that Gelsinger wants to restore Intel’s status as the leader of the semiconductor industry but doing so requires a number of manufacturing upgrades and the delivery of powerful new computer chips. Intel aims to restore the U.S. market share of chip manufacturing, which has dropped from 37 percent in 1990 to just 12 percent today. Gelsinger commented: “Over the decade in front of us, we should be striving to bring the US to 30% of worldwide semiconductor manufacturing.”

Acknowledgement. Goodbye Taiwan

Hopefully its the Cape Cod style chips.

Any new manufacturing facilities in the U.S. is very good news. Hopefully these companies are realizing that the ones with product right now, are the ones making big money and how much they're losing out because their Chinese shit is stuck on a freighter or port somewhere and they could have made a lot more money IF they had the goods to sell.

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
I don’t think they should have public money to build the facility.

Come on, man.....think of the CHILDREN!

I worked for them for a few years, both as a contractor and as an employee, and have mixed feelings about this announcement.

As far as U.S. semiconductor manufacturers go, there is no doubt that Intel is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. They are a Fortune 500 company with household brand name recognition and sites around the world. When I was with them they had over 100k employees/ contractors.

The speed at which they go from R&D chip design to production is amazing, their consistency in quality production is enviable, and their innovation is certainly noteworthy... but there are other U.S. chip makers who have produced equally innovative and high quality designs that simply don't have the brand name recognition.

Intel has deep pockets and is legendary within the industry, for throwing money at both efforts and problems. Often, this approach works.. but sometimes it doesn't and just masks root cause problems.

Their vendors often maintain offices on site or in some cases nearby, and they are more than willing to bill full price + for their services and products. Intel pays top dollar with the expectation that all who are on site conform to their culture.

In one of the departments I worked in, there was a need for a quantity of specific stainless steel hardware, and they had been using a vendor in another state (they also had a sites in that state) who they had a long standing relationship with. This vendor didn't have what we needed for our project (which was on a timeline) and when they did they charged ridiculous money for it, and predicted it would be weeks/ months before they would be able to ship what we needed. So one day, on my lunch break, I went to a local outfit with samples of what we needed, talked to a rep. who had what we needed in stock, and the icing on the cake was that he would bill the company @ %40 less than what we were being billed by the long term out of state vendor. I took his business card with the details back to my immediate supervisor, a very nice and attractive young lady, who promptly filed it away, and waited weeks before eventually ordering from this new source.

I knew a guy who had worked for them years earlier, and he had been overpaid on one paycheck. He took one of his days off, stood in line at the H.R. office (back when the company had on site H.R. offices staffed by real people) and when he finally got the chance to explain the over payment, the H.R. rep. simply said something along the lines of our mistake... keep it. It was literally easier for them to give the money away, rather than acknowledge and correct the mistake. A similar thing happened to me; their payroll system is convoluted and complicated and, as a brand new contractor, I was already making really great money, so when my O.M. called me in for a meeting to apologize to me and explain that someone had mis-entered a payroll code during my onboarding and the company owed me thousands more in back pay, I was just floored.

These are just a couple of the multiple examples of the complicated bureaucracy within the company. Most government bureaucrats would blush with envy at the intricate level of bureaucracy institutionalized within the company.

It's probably worth mentioning that, for those who are aware of Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, YouTube etc... Progressive Leftist tendencies, Intel fits right in and it's evident in their culture. The employees themselves are represented by the political spectrum, and I knew workers on every side of the fence, but the corporate leaders are progressive leftists. They contribute large sums of money to various causes, and they actively encourage their employees to get involved and do the same, and so they've done some real good, both at the community level and globally, but there is very much a collectivist, Big Brother aspect found in their corporate culture.

Make no mistake about it, behind the scenes the company leaders are very plugged into global politics, and I would guess domestic politics as well. In one example, a corporate executive, along with U.S. government reps. met with Indian (India) leaders and convinced (influenced) them to lower their excessive tax rates on all things high tech. I'm all for lower tax rates, but still a bit concerning that I was working for a company that pulled that kind of weight on a global scale within the industry.

It's probably no surprise that a Big Tech company would have an interest in high tech gadgets and solutions, many which work...but Intel gravitated towards those shiny toys, sometimes as a crutch rather than adopting cheaper easier solutions that were less apt to serve as distractions, or be abused. Big Tech gotta look Big Tech.

The company has a fascination with the concept of safety. I think most would agree that taking reasonable steps to keep employees safe is a good thing, but safety has become an obsession by Intel that has been institutionalized into the culture. It's literally possible for an employee to be fired for getting an injury as minor as a paper cut and not reporting it, and if an investigation determines that the proper techniques and/ or safety gear were not being used while getting the paper cut. I used to (quietly) keep a couple Band-Aids in my pocket any time I was on the clock.

I don't know if Intel is receiving tax dollars or other incentives to build these new Ohio fabs but, if so, all these examples to show that, while I'm glad a U.S. manufacturer is building a site in the U.S. that will hire U.S. workers, I have concerns about it being Intel, as there are smaller, hungrier, more nimble companies that aren't as bloated and bogged down in bureaucracy and dogma, that would probably make better use of tax payer dollars.

Assuming that Intel does get these Fabs up and running, it will still take years to get them fully equipped, fully staffed, fully trained, and even after these things happen it will take several more months to a year or more before the first processes are approved and the first saleable chips are ready to be shipped, and there is a critical need for those chips now... which means that Taiwan is still critical in meeting U.S. needs for the next few years.

$20 billion will move a lot of mountains, but will also allow for a lot of waste or misuse.

Ultimately, despite the massive amounts of money that Intel threw into the new Fab I was hired to help stand up, it failed and was closed down.

Starting a new Fab is a complicated, expensive, time consuming undertaking, and throwing money at a problem isn't always a recipe for success.

Yep, I've toured a large fab campus here in VA from a failed German manufacturer. Predicting the need well ahead to allow for ample time to build the manufacturing facilities is a risky gamble.

I hope we are doing that sort of stuff for a lot of other industries that have gone offshore in the last few decades. Spending that money for real jobs would be a lot more productive than the "free" giveaway programs.
On the other hand, the time to build this facility is about the same as it took us to win WW2, converting industries, including developing and producing the bomb (the big one). And that was starting out with an unproven theory.

The semiconductor manufacturer I worked for here has a big construction project going at one of their fabs.

flashguy

I have worked as a Design Engineer at Intel for 25 years. I am happy that they are building again in the US. They are always building new fabs and decommissioning old ones as the technology gets faster and smaller. It's no secret that where they build (like every big Corporation) is dictated in part by the local tax breaks they are afforded. That's how biz works.