Over the last 24-48 hours, Intel announced multiple investments in building and expanding advanced foundries to meet the growing market demand. The first and more expensive venture will be based in Haifa, Israel where the company is spending over $10 billion on two major projects: A $200 million R&D and “Mega Chip Design” facility with over 6,000 workers and another $10 billion on a chip foundry with an additional $1 billion grant from the Israeli government. The former will be used to turn the Jerusalem-headquartered Mobileye unit into an R&D campus while the latter will add to the company’s 10nm/7nm advanced node capacity.
During a news conference today, Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger also announced that its Rio Rancho campus in New Mexico will be getting an investment of $3.5 billion to expand the production of advanced packaging technologies, mostly notably Foveros and EMIB. This expansion in partnership with the local and state government is expected to provide 1,000 construction jobs, 700 permanent technical posts at the fab, and another 3,500 non-technical positions at the campus over the next three years.
The Rio Rancho facility will support Intel’s advanced packaging ambitions which are only going to expand as process nodes become less relevant and modular (chiplet) designs take over. Although the 3D packaging technology “Foveros” is the prime focus of this campus, it’ll also work on improving the Embedded Multi-Die Bridge (EMIB) technology which is one of the key pillars of Intel’s tiled designs.
