Intel Corp on Friday broke ground on two new factories in Arizona as part of its turnaround plan to become a major manufacturer of chips for outside customers.
The US$20 billion plants — dubbed Fab 52 and Fab 62 — would bring the total number of Intel factories at its campus in Chandler, Arizona, to six.
They would house Intel’s most advanced chipmaking technology and play a central role in the Santa Clara, California-based company’s effort to regain its lead in making the smallest, fastest chips by 2025, after falling behind rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電).
Photo: Reuters
The new Arizona plants would also be the first Intel has built from the ground up with space reserved for outside customers. Intel has long made its own chips, but its turnaround plan calls for taking on work for outsiders such as Qualcomm Inc and Amazon.com Inc’s cloud unit, as well as deepening its manufacturing relationship with the US military.
“We want to have more resilience to the supply chain,” said Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger, who earlier in the week attended a White House meeting on the global chip shortage. “As the only company on US soil that can do the most advanced lithography processes in the world, we are going to step up in a big way.”
Gelsinger said it was too early to say how much of the new plants’ capacity would be reserved for outside customers.
The plants would produce “thousands” of wafers per week, he said.
Wafers are the silicon discs on which chips are made, and each can hold hundreds or even thousands of chips.
Intel rival TSMC has also purchased land to build its first US campus in Phoenix, not far from Intel’s location, where TSMC plans up to six chip factories.
Gelsinger said that Intel plans to announce another US campus site before the end of the year that would eventually hold eight chip factories.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
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