Intel abandons chip plants in Germany and Poland, confirms more layoffs Ailing chip giant Intel is ditching its manufacturing sites in Germany and Poland and signaling further job cuts ahead as its new leader tries to stem the losses and turn the Silicon Valley pioneer's fortunes around. In a memo to all employees, chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said he was choosing a different approach to building up …
Not just there, but farmers around there and taxpayers in the country. Subsidies amounted to about € 1 million per job!
However, the foundry business might actually be Intel's future as that's something it knows a lot about, if it can only become archictecture neutral: TSMC got bigger on the back of making CPUs for phones, a market Intel was never really comfortable with.
Itel wanted to put an x86 on ao hone.
I know, I worked for them. Wed hear all sorts of crap spounted during the town halls - Atom has produce a low power x86 ... if we project the reduction out 20 years then we will be asss power effeicient asthe current ARM chips ....
It was like being in a fucking madhouse.
They did use ARM for some of their specialist chips, aimed at telecoms.
I have a sneaky suspicion that ARM was used as the specialist cores were so power hungry.
A division had to produced Intel all the way down .was the pitch.
Anyhow, boards arrived, about 12 books of documentation, explaining the new CPU.
Plugged it in, turned in .. barely worked.
Contact chip team. All mvoed on.
Wait, what?
Intel's chief also hinted at a new AI strategy, saying the chipmaker had previously approached AI with a traditional, silicon and training-centric mindset, and that this needed to change.
"We will focus our AI efforts on developing a cohesive silicon, system and software stack strategy," he stated, claiming Intel has already started "incubating new capabilities" and attracting new talent.
Simon (the mighty BOFH) should do well to keep an eye on this - perhaps he can "upgrade" some of his users (or The Bossly Unit) with the new AI chippery from Intel... :) A couple of free Beta AI chips will do just well I can imagine...
---> latest BOFH (for some context) : https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/bofh_2025_episode_14/
My best guess is that they're focusing on how to get people who previously wouldn't buy anything other than Nvidia because of CUDA to buy an Intel part instead by developing some more software. They could try that either by building a rigorous compatibility layer with CUDA like AMD's been periodically trying and trying not to have to, by building something better than CUDA (good luck to them), or something like that. Of course, that's just me trying to turn a dangerous combination of management speak and speaking to the nontechnical* into actual words, so it's likely I've completely missed their point and guessed wrong.
* Management speak is bad on its own, but when you add in talking to investors who do not understand why people buy chips but will overreact if the words say anything about competitors doing well, almost all remaining meaning is lost.
"...If you are not making a profit, you are not a business, you are a charity leaching off your banks."
But most times, you are leaching off the taxpayer. [Emoji not for us, but for the politicians who think we're too dumb to have figured this out...]
At one point I worked for a company in West Sussex which produced systems that took the wafers and etched/grew/magicked the chips on them. that was orders higher than 3nm though and I am not sure the company even exists any more. UK has never been very good at properly developing/marketing ideas
It needs to die a horrible death and be a warning for future companies. They invested heavily in ASML then just decided not to use the tech they invested in, TSMC did. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. All these semicon companies run by accountants, MBAs or even worse, Private Equity vultures should be worried. All intels talent has long moved on and are in far better places in their career, whether it's Apple, AMD, NVIDIA or their own company.
I feel like I'm in the end of the Soviet Union. Hysterical bleating about the utopian project handed down by the party elite as increasing disinvestment in the quality of life of the common folk mounts leads to a despotic "outsider" leader promising more immiseration.
The thing that really gets me is that Intel wants external customers to use its fabs but isn't willing to produce its own products there. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence towards potential customers.
Unless I was compelled by the US government to use the Intel fab I'd steer clear of it. My guess is that Intel is betting on manufacturers eventually being forced to use its fabs by the government. Or coerced through punitive tariffs.
There's a very solid chance Intel will become a fabless manufacturer in a couple of years. That will equate to tens of thousands more job losses.
I was an "accidental Intel employee" about 20 years ago, back when Intel was definitely King of the Hill. At least from the outside. There were problems even then and one in particular should have been addressed back then. It was put simply by my boss as "there are two semiconductor fabrication processes out there, ours (Intel's) and everyone else's". You could see why this is a big problem -- semiconductor production is a weird global enterprise that's a mixture of cutthroat competition and intense collaboration. The technology is too complex for any one company to go it alone. Intel, being an early adopter, had a huge start and entrenched product base so it was huge almost beyond human comprehension and insanely profitable. This would have made changing course difficult, the temptation would be to just keep kicking the can down the road and pressuring the process development staff to do more, but eventually they were going to run out of steam, they'd just have to wind down their individual efforts and join the process mainstream. Which appears to be exactly what the current CEO is doing.
Being insanely successful can be very destructive. It leads to a "NIH" mindset and hubris. You get lulled into thinking that being successful is pre-ordained rather than being Number One just paints a huge target on your back. This isn't just true for individual companies -- countries can suffer the same mindset. Failure to maintain forward momentum might not cause immediate problems if the lead is large enough, they're just be seemingly isolated reverses, many easily explained away as unimportant or temporary. But they gradually build up.
Indeed. When you are doing what is both successful and profitable, but you can see a light ahead, when is the right time to step off the tracks?
The answer is: not until it is too late.
In reality the best economic outcome likely comes from riding it down, and going/shrinking out of business while the new competitor takes over. It looks like a bad choice, but in what way was Kodaks slide out of business actually a bad thing except in certain localised spots.
Changing a business is like trying to put motorways through an existing city center. It is better to just build a new place the way it needs to be now, than try to rebuild an existing structure while trying to keep it running at the same time.
An example we can watch in real time is EVs. Tesla were the front runner for a very long time but now other companies/countries are coming up from behind after taking note of what Tesla does and how. They have approached it differently in some areas and are putting out products which for the regular consumer are just as good but are at a much lower price point. Tesla now have to work out if they can compete or if they diversify/fold
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