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 US.
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 $32bn, 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.