At Intel’s new 700-acre factory in the Arizona desert, the company has started large-scale production on the most advanced chips it has ever manufactured in the United States.
Intel claims to have cracked long-standing technical barriers in a new manufacturing process, after years of effort – producing faster and more efficient chips that will start appearing in laptops and data centres next year.
Its two state-of-the-art Arizona factories, which cost $32 billion (€27.6 billion), represent a crucial gamble to show sceptical Big Tech customers that Intel’s latest process can compete with its dominant Taiwan-based rival TSMC – and to prove that advanced chipmaking in the US is still possible.
“It is the most advanced semiconductor technology in production today on planet earth,” said Kevin O’Buckley, senior vice-president of Intel’s foundry business. “But we know we have a long way to go to deliver trust for our customers.”
These big claims will be carefully tested by prospective clients such as Nvidia, Apple and Qualcomm before they decide to entrust their future chipmaking to Intel.
“I think the timeline is six to eight months,” said Ben Bajarin, chief executive and principal analyst at consultancy Cr
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