Inside Intel’s Hail Mary to Reclaim Chip Dominance

After 4 years of development, Intel mentioned on Thursday that its Fab 52 semiconductor plant in Chandler, Arizona, is now turning out its first chips. The corporate additionally shared extra particulars concerning the long-awaited CPUs that it is going to be producing within the facility utilizing Intel’s brand-new 18A course of expertise.

The announcement comes simply six weeks after the Trump administration acquired a 9.9 % stake in Intel in change for $8.9 billion in inventory. The fab opening, whereas lengthy within the works, is the primary main alternative for the struggling US chipmaker to persuade the broader tech trade that it might produce a number of the world’s most superior chips at scale—and that the White Home’s funding would possibly repay.

Late final month, Intel invited dozens of analysts and enterprise companions, together with a handful of journalists, to tour Fab 52. The tour provided a particularly uncommon glimpse into the world of trendy chipmaking, the place robots carry out most duties, lithography machines the dimensions of college buses print microscopic patterns on silicon wafers, and staff shuffle round in anti-contamination “bunny fits,” booties, goggles, and gloves. (Company are required to put on the fits, too.) Intel says that the air throughout the fab is recycled each six seconds.

All of that is to forestall contamination of the delicate silicon wafers that all the computing trade runs on. If a single speck of something lands on a wafer, it may be irreparably broken.

Make or Break

Intel says that its Fab 52 has technically been operational since July, and the brand new era of chips being made there, dubbed Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest, have been within the works for years at this level.

However Intel determined to indicate off its new fab at a important second for the corporate. The power is designed to make chips utilizing a brand new course of, known as 18A, that’s speculated to yield extra highly effective and environment friendly merchandise. “Speculated to” is vital: Intel’s near-term destiny hangs on whether or not it might produce semiconductors which might be spectacular sufficient to not solely serve its ordinary {hardware} and pc prospects, but additionally appeal to AI firms with massive sums of money to spend on superior chips and knowledge facilities.

Through the tour, Intel executives emphasised that Fab 52 is probably the most superior chip manufacturing plant on this planet. That will technically be true—the corporate’s fabs, or foundries, “have been lengthy identified and revered within the trade for making the following node potential,” says Austin Lyons, an analyst at Inventive Methods and founding father of Chipstrat, a semiconductor publication. Within the early 2010s, for instance, Intel made one other important node, or course of development, when it launched 32-nanometer chip expertise. (Its newest chips are 2-nanometer.)