After four years of construction, Intel said on Thursday that its Fab 52 semiconductor plant in Chandler, Arizona is now turning out its first chips. The company also shared more details about the long-awaited CPUs that it will be producing in the facility using Intel’s brand new 18A process technology.
The announcement comes just six weeks after the Trump administration acquired a 9.9 percent stake in Intel in exchange for $8.9 billion in stock. The fab opening, while long in the works, is the first major opportunity for the struggling American chip maker to convince the broader tech industry that it can produce some of the world’s most advanced chips at scale—and that the White House’s investment might pay off.
Late last month, Intel invited dozens of analysts and business partners, along with a handful of journalists, to tour Fab 52. The tour offered an extremely rare glimpse into the world of modern chipmaking, where robots perform most tasks, lithography machines the size of school buses print microscopic patterns on silicon wafers, and workers shuffle around in anti-contamination “bunny suits,” booties, goggles, and gloves. (Guests are required to wear the suits, too.) Intel says that the air within the fab is recycled every six seconds.
All of this is to prevent contamination of the fragile silicon wafers that the entire computing industry runs on. If a single speck of anything lands on a wafer, it can be irreparably damaged.
Make or Break
Intel says that its Fab 52 has technically been operational since July, and the new generation of chips being made there, dubbed Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest, have been in the works for years at this point.
But Intel decided to show off its new fab at a critical moment for the company. The facility is designed to make chips using a new process, called 18A, that’s supposed to yield more powerful and efficient products. “Supposed to” is key: Intel’s near-term fate hangs on whether it can produce semiconductors that are impressive enough to not only serve its usual hardware and computer customers, but also attract AI companies with large sums of cash to spend on advanced chips and data centers.
During the tour, Intel executives emphasized that Fab 52 is the most advanced chip manufacturing plant in the world. That may technically be true—the company's fabs, or foundries, “have been long known and respected in the industry for making the next node possible,” says Austin Lyons, an analyst at Creative Strategies and founder of Chipstrat, a semiconductor publication. In the early 2010s, for example, Intel made another significant node, or process advancement, when it introduced 32-nanometer chip technology. (Its latest chips are 2-nanometer.)