Intel expanding fab capacity in Oregon, Ireland and Israel

Intel announces it's planning to expand its manufacturing sites in Oregon, Ireland, and Israel. This multi-year project will enable the chip giant to respond more quickly to upticks in the market and reduce the time to increase supply by roughly 60 percent. These projects are expected to begin in 2019. They will not help with the current 14nm supply issues, but may help if Intel faces a similar situation in the future:

Intel is transforming from a PC-centric company to a data-centric company — serving the incredible market appetite for solutions that process, analyze, store and share information. As a result, we are now competing to win in an estimated $300 billion total addressable market for silicon — making a more diverse array of products at ever-higher volumes for a broader set of customers. Intel is not just the CPU inside your personal computer. We are the safety features in your car, the wireless connection in your phone, the intelligence in the cloud and more. Intel’s ability to optimize and apply our manufacturing expertise to deliver more advanced, differentiated products is foundational to our current and future success.

With the biggest market opportunity in Intel’s history ahead of us, we will take the necessary steps to prepare our global manufacturing network for flexibility and responsiveness to changes in demand.

This year, we raised our capital expenditures forecast and put that money to work expanding our 14nm manufacturing capacity to increase supply. We also made good progress on the previously announced schedule for Fab 42 fit-out in Arizona, and we made the decision to locate development of a new generation of storage and memory technology at our manufacturing plant in New Mexico. Looking ahead, we are now in the early planning phase for manufacturing site expansions in Oregon, Ireland and Israel, with multi-year construction activities expected to begin in 2019.

Having additional fab space at-the-ready will help us respond more quickly to upticks in the market and enables us to reduce our time to increased supply by up to roughly 60 percent. In the weeks and months ahead, we will be working through discussions and permitting with local governments and communities. It is important to note that site expansion and the related investment will be taken in stages and are always subject to change based on business, economic and other factors.

In addition to expanding Intel’s own manufacturing capability, we will continue our selective use of foundries for certain technologies where it makes sense for the business. The use of foundries has been an Intel practice for nearly two decades. As we invent more products for a broader set of customers, you can expect us to be strategic about the application of Intel’s differentiated manufacturing capability and the selective use of foundries.

Intel isn’t just inventing technology’s future, we’re building it. We will continue applying our advantages as an integrated device manufacturer to deliver the world’s best silicon. To do that, we will continue to ensure we have the necessary global manufacturing footprint and capabilities as our business expands.

Dr. Ann B. Kelleher is senior vice president and general manager of Manufacturing and Operations at Intel Corporation.