[ad_1]
Under Donald Trump and Joe Biden alike, the US has been determined to “reshore” chipmaking. Now money and colossal infrastructure are flowing to a vast Intel site in Ohio—just as the company may be falling apart.
[ad_2]
Source link
Tag: microchips
-
The Great American Microchip Mobilization
-
Hurricane Helene Will Send Shockwaves Through the Semiconductor Industry
[ad_1]
A spokesperson for Sibelco said: “As of September 26th, we have temporarily halted operations at the Spruce Pine facilities in response to these challenges.
“We are working closely with our local team to safely restart operations as soon as we can and are actively coordinating with local authorities and other partners to manage the situation. Our top priority remains the health, safety, and wellbeing of our employees, as well as ensuring the security of the Spruce Pine facility.”
Quartz Corp did not reply to an immediate request for comment from WIRED.
Viral social media posts have claimed that due to the flooding, global production of semiconductors could halt. This doomsday scenario is unlikely, but experts are gravely concerned about the impact the flooding could have on the tech industry and the economic ramifications of prolonged supply chain pressures caused by the shutdown of the site.
“The key thing will not be just the floods, as bad as they are,” says Chris Hackney, a researcher in human geography at Newcastle University in the UK. “The damage to infrastructure—roads, transport, power, and mining equipment—will stop production for a while. There’s potential for landslides.”
Hackney adds that “any disruption to supply chains will have an impact on prices and production of high-ended electronics and tech.”
Tom Bide, a senior scientist at the British Geological Survey, believes it’s possible the disaster will prove minimally disruptive due to stockpiling and other kinds of contingency work.
“The impact on the tech industry will very much depend on how long it takes them to get operations running again,” he says. “It is likely most manufacturers have some level of stockpiles so there will be some ‘slack’ in the system. If the issues are temporary this may have no discernible effect.”
Bide estimates it would take around a month for any serious impacts to be felt.
Other researchers, however, warned that serious costs are likely to be incurred as a result of the disaster. Penn says he “would be surprised if there were not a flinch felt, if not more.”
“Any rippling impact on the global tech sector will depend on the scale of the damage. There is little publicly available data on HPQ reserves globally. The physical products that Spruce Pine produces do not remain there. They are shipped to other countries—often Norway—for the processing and refining stages before distribution around the world.”
Penn, who has coauthored a forthcoming paper on Spruce Pine alongside independent researcher Fran Baker Kurdi, tells WIRED that the episode is likely to trigger interacting climate impacts.
“I’d imagine that industry would turn to the use of lower purity material if indeed there is a rippling shortage,” he says. “This is a shame as the industrial processes required to purify silicon are energy intensive and ecologically damaging. In other words, this tragic encounter with climate instability in North Carolina could have a knock-on effect that exacerbates climate instability elsewhere. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Penn also cites a number of serious chemical pollution cases that Quartz Corp has been at the center of in recent decades.
Between 1981 and 2018, he notes, Quartz Corp faced six violation cases for contamination offenses, including toxic chemical leakages. In 2018, the company leaked hundreds of gallons of hydrofluoric acid into a nearby river basin. The discharge caused a fish kill and was one of a number of water rules violations Quartz Corp has committed over the last decade, some of which have resulted in fines.
“One lesson to take from this is that an ‘AI’ future is not inevitable,” Penn adds. “Even if Spruce Pine persists intact, the damage done to local communities is a stark reminder of the need to make infrastructural commitments that sync with ecologies rather than working against them.
“I fear that AI investments and climate instability are on a collision course. This may be the first domino to fall.”
[ad_2]
Source link -
Intel Is Cutting More Than 15,000 Jobs Despite Getting Billions From the US Government
[ad_1]
In a move likely to raise a few taxpayer eyebrows, Intel said today that it will cut 15 percent of its workforce, or more than 15,000 jobs, as it struggles to rebound from disappointing results. In March, the US government said it would give Intel no less than $8.5 billion to help it rebuild its US chipmaking operations.
Intel said that its revenues were down 1 percent year-on-year for the second quarter. “We do not take this lightly, and we have carefully considered the impact this will have on the Intel family,” CEO Pat Gelsinger said on an earnings call today. “These are hard, but necessary decisions. These reductions do not impact our ability to execute our plan.”
The job cuts will affect areas including sales, marketing, and administrative roles, Intel said, and would be part of a general cost-cutting plan. The move follows a 5 percent reduction in staff announced by Intel last year.
“It is a lot of jobs,” Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, a chip industry consultancy, tells WIRED. However, Moorhead says, it is a positive sign that the proposed layoffs appear to be targeted and not across the board. “Layoffs don’t always mean there’s something wrong with a company, but to me it’s all about the strategy,” he says.
Intel is struggling to execute a challenging turnaround plan that involves refocusing on making chips for others through its foundry business and moving more quickly to cutting-edge manufacturing methods. In February, the company said its accelerated roadmap for producing cutting-edge chips was on track and promised to become the world’s second-placed foundry company by 2030. Intel said today that it is still on track to meet these goals.
The money Intel received in March is the biggest grant awarded by the US government so far through the CHIPS Act, 2022 legislation passed that will appropriated $52.7 billion to reshore chip manufacturing and invest in chip research and workforce training. The company will also receive tax credits of up to 25 percent on $100 billion in investments and will be eligible for federal loans up to $11 billion.
The $8.5 billion given to Intel will go toward building plants in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon. Intel said the investments it is making in these chipmaking plants will create over 10,000 company jobs, 20,000 construction jobs, and thousands more roles in supporting industries. “The money that Intel has brought in is being used to build factories,” says Moorehead of Moor Insights & Strategy. “That isn’t stopping, and it does create a lot of jobs.”
After decades of success thanks to the rise of personal computing, Intel failed to capitalize on the smartphone era, ceding market share to chips based on Arm’s designs. More recently, it has seen Nvidia, a company that started out making graphics chips for gaming, rise to prominence thanks to the importance of its hardware for training AI algorithms. Intel has also fallen behind its manufacturing competitors, TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in South Korea.
The US government is helping fund Intel’s reboot because advanced chips are seen as crucial to economic and geopolitical competitiveness. The pandemic highlighted how vulnerable many US industries are to a fragile global supply chain. Advanced chips are also crucial for building AI, which is increasingly seen as a national imperative.
Today the US makes 12 percent of the world’s semiconductors, compared with 37 percent in the 1990s. The consulting firm McKinsey has predicted that the value of the semiconductor industry would grow impressively this decade, from $600 billion in 2021 to more than $1 trillion by 2030.
Dan Hutcheson, an analyst with Tech Insights, says Intel’s revenue shortfall reflects an ongoing shift toward AI-focused datacenter computing. “It used to be that [Intel] owned the datacenter,” Hutcheson says. “What we’ve seen in the last few years is that the big hyperscalers have focused on AI and GPUs—entire AI datacenters.”
Hutcheson says Intel’s overall strategy seems to make sense but the cuts suggest that the company is struggling to solve the dysfunction that saw the company fall behind in the first place.
[ad_2]
Source link