Some Good News For America

One America News is reporting today that on Friday Intel Corp broke ground in Arizona for two new factories.

The article reports:

The $20 billion plants – dubbed Fab 52 and Fab 62 – will bring the total number of Intel factories at its campus in Chandler, Arizona, to six. They will house Intel’s most advanced chipmaking technology and play a central role in the Santa Clara, California-based company’s effort to regain its lead in making the smallest, fastest chips by 2025, after having fallen behind rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd.

The new Arizona plants will also be the first Intel has built from the ground up with space reserved for outside customers. Intel has long made its own chips, but its turnaround plan calls for taking on work for outsiders such as Qualcomm Inc Amazon.com’s cloud unit, as well as deepening its manufacturing relationship with the U.S. military.

“We want to have more resilience to the supply chain,” Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger, who earlier in the week attended a White House meeting on the global chip shortage, told Reuters in an interview. “As the only company on U.S. soil that can do the most advanced lithography processes in the world, we are going to step up in a big way.”

Gelsinger said it was too early to say how much of the new plants’ capacity would be reserved for outside customers. He said the plants would produce “thousands” of wafers per week.

Wafers are the silicon discs on which chips are made, and each can hold hundreds or even thousands of chips.

It’s time to bring chip manufacturing back to America (along with a lot of other manufacturing–pharmaceuticals, athletic shoes, steel, wallboard, pet food, covid masks, etc.). Experience has shown us that not all products manufactured in China live up to American manufacturing standards and are safe for consumption in America.