Inside Intel’s Hail Mary to regain chip dominance

Four years later Intel said Thursday that its Fab 52 semiconductor factory in Chandler, Arizona, is now producing its first chips. The company also shared more details about the long-awaited CPUs it will produce at the facility using Intel’s all-new 18A process technology.

This announcement comes just six weeks after the Trump administration acquired a 9.9% stake in Intel for $8.9 billion in stock. The opening, though time-consuming, is the struggling U.S. chipmaker’s first big chance to convince the broader technology industry that it can produce some of the world’s most advanced chips at scale — and that the White House’s investment could pay off.

Late last month, Intel invited dozens of analysts and business partners, along with a handful of journalists, to tour Fab 52. The tour offered an extremely rare glimpse into the world of modern chipmaking, where robots perform most tasks, lithography machines the size of school buses print microscopic patterns on silicon chips, and workers move around wearing “suits.” Rabbit, socks, goggles, goggles and pollution-proof gloves. (Guests are also required to wear suits.) Intel says the air inside the factory is recycled every six seconds.

All of this is aimed at preventing contamination of the fragile silicon chips on which the entire computing industry works. If a single atom of anything falls on a chip, it can be damaged beyond repair.

Make or break it

Intel says its Fab 52 has been technically up and running since July, and that the new generation of chips being made there, dubbed Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest, have been in the works for years at this point.

But Intel decided to showcase its new capabilities at a critical moment for the company. The facility is designed to manufacture chips using a new process called 18A, which is supposed to produce more powerful and efficient products. “Supposed” is the key: Intel’s near-term fate depends on whether it can produce semiconductors impressive enough to not only serve its usual hardware and PC customers, but also attract AI companies with huge sums of money to spend on advanced chips and data centers.

During the tour, Intel executives emphasized that Fab 52 is the most advanced chip manufacturing plant in the world. This may be technically true, as the company’s fabs or foundries are “long known and respected in the industry for making the next node possible,” says Austin Lyons, an analyst at Creative Strategies and founder of Chipstrat, a semiconductor magazine. In early 2010, for example, Intel made another important milestone, or process breakthrough, when it introduced 32nm chip technology. (Its latest chips are 2nm).