is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
In April, Intel attempted to announce layoffs without announcing layoffs. “We have not set any headcount reduction target,” Intel spokesperson Sophie Metzger told The Verge. But the company has laid off thousands of employees since — and today, in the company’s Q2 2025 earnings, it has revealed that Intel will dramatically shrink as a result of those layoffs. Intel says it will retreat from planned projects in Germany and Poland, end its assembly and test operations in Costa Rica, and finish 2025 with just around 75,000 “core employees” in total.
Intel employed 109,800 people at the end of 2024, of which 99,500 were “core employees,” so the company is pushing out around 24,000 people this year — shrinking Intel by roughly one-quarter. (It has also divested other businesses, shrinking the larger organization as well.)
Today, on the company’s earnings call, Intel’s CEO says that Intel had overinvested in new factories before it had secured enough demand, that its factories had become “needlessly fragmented,” and that it needs to grow its capacity “in lock step” with achieving actual milestones.
“I do not subscribe to the believe that if you build it, they will come. Under my leadership, we will build what customers need when they need it, and earn their trust,” says Tan.
Now, in Germany and Poland, where Intel was planning to spend tens of billions of dollars respectively on “mega-fabs” that would employ 3,000 workers, and on an assembly and test facility that would employ 2,000 workers, the company will “no longer move forward with planned projects” and is apparently axing them entirely.
Intel has had a presence in Poland since 1993, however, and the company did not say its R&D facilities there are closing. (Intel had previously pressed pause on the new Germany and Poland projects “by approximately two years” back in 2024.)
In Costa Rica, where Intel employs over 3,400 people, the company will “consolidate its assembly and test operations in Costa Rica into its larger sites in Vietnam.” Intel spokesperson Sophie Metzger tells The Verge that over 2,000 Costa Rica employees should remain to work in engineering and corporate, though.
The company is also cutting back in Ohio: “Intel will further slow the pace of construction in Ohio to ensure spending is aligned with market demand.” Intel CFO David Zinsner says Intel will continue to make investments there, though, and construction will continue.
It’s not clear if the layoffs will slow now that we’re over halfway through the year, but Intel states today that it has already “completed the majority of the planned headcount actions it announced last quarter to reduce its core workforce by approximately 15 percent.”
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