“Intel Corp. used President Obama’s visit to disclose plans to build a $5 billion chip factory in Arizona and hire 4,000 workers, moves that dovetail with the administration’s job-creation agenda,” Don Clark and Joel Millman report for The Wall Street Journal. “The move, made by Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini as the president toured Intel’s operations in Oregon, is the latest in a series of steps by the Silicon Valley giant to boost manufacturing capacity and use new production processes to boost chip performance.”
“President Obama’s trip west to meet with high-tech leaders comes amid a looming budget fight in Washington and corporate opposition to some of the president’s policies,” Clark and Millman report. “On Thursday, Mr. Obama had a dinner near San Francisco with a dozen high-tech CEOs, including Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs, Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google Inc.’s Eric Schmidt and Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison.”
Clark and Millman report, “Mr. Otellini hasn’t been shy about criticizing the administration; Intel has expressed concerns about the high cost of doing business in the U.S. and the possible impact of proposed greenhouse gas regulation.”
“Intel said the new factory, in Chandler, Ariz., will have capability to make chips with dimensions as small as 14 nanometers,” Clark and Millman report. “Chandler is already home to one of the company’s biggest production sites, though it also has high-volume manufacturing in Oregon, New Mexico, Ireland, Israel and China. The new project will lead to thousands of construction and permanent manufacturing jobs, Intel said. Construction is expected to begin in the middle of this year and is expected to be completed in 2013, Intel said.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
I’ll get pictures as soon as construction begins…
kudos to them. now lets see Apple man up and build factories here and let americans have jobs building ipads and macs.
Apple has added 32,000 jobs in the last 4 years, with 95% of those in the US. Why don’t you “man up” and look up the facts first?
But how many jobs were added by subcontractors to assemble Apple products. Apple doesn’t directly employ many assembly workers anywhere.
Of course the vaunted American free market should have produced the Taiwan/China contract electronics assembly business, but it didn’t.
Really, KenC?
“As of September 26, 2009, Apple Inc. has a total of 34,300 full-time regular employees and 2,500 full-time temporary and contractual employees, bringing its total employee count to 36,800. This is according to the Annual Report filed by Apple Inc. to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in October 27, 2009.”
Your “facts” do not add up.
…biting my tongue…refraining from cheap illegal labor comments…
How will the Chinese commute?
Via Siberia like their ancestor Native Americans did 12000 yrs ago
Don’t think there will be many employees that don’t pass the government check system for legit employment status.
People running the plant are CERTAINLY not going to be “cheap illegal labor” types, as chip production is certainly trained high-tech employment, except for the parking lot sweepers.
Chip production will be highly automated, inside clean rooms and vaccuum chambers. Many cheap labors for unloading and loading trucks (or may be well paid to prevent them from stealing chips). Few highly trained engineers and technicians to maintain the production lines.
@ed
Apple knows better than build products in a country dominated by overpaid lazy drunk union workers. Just look at what they did to the school system and car companies. would you by a Government Motors car or put your kid in public school? I wouldn’t.
i agree. that’s why unions have ruined this country. but if japanese can build factories here and fill them with non union workers, then apple can too
So, steve, are you overpaid and drunk? Or just logically challenged?
Actually, you are logically challenged. Steve didn’t say that all workers in the US were lazy, drunk union workers, just that it was dominated by them.
Good news, but I don’t see how a chip manufacturing can support 4000 employees. As someone mentioned, it’s highly automated. What will be the true number of permanent employees at the factory?
Those are construction jobs to build the plant for several years.
Those are not permanent jobs.
Design, lay out, maintenance, logistics, purchasing, security, IT, R&D, process control, industiral engineers. There are probably a dozen more sl;ots that I’m leaving out or forgetting. Multiply that by the number of chip families that you’re going to try to introduce the 14 micron process to .
A “chip” factory doesn’t need design, layout, R&D, engineers, etc., the same as an auto assembly plant doesn’t need the design team there. They will need maintenance, both high- and low-tech, logistics, security, IT; most of these have no relation to the number of chip families. Jubie is right, the number of permanent employees doesn’t need to be that big. Hopefully, it’ll be a boon to the community, but how many of the high tech people will be there already? Not many, I would guess, so, the overall impact is really hard to project.
This is a huge deal. Manufacturing is not feasible without automation and particularly without the scale that Intel brings to the table. The Phoenix area, despite liberal attempts to paint it as backwards, leads the nation in high tech employment, especially with respect to chip manufacturing. Think about it – $5B USD.
Weren’t they going to do this 10 years ago?
Ppl need the the ability to collective bargaining. Oh pls over paid union workers my ass it really boils down to the union we need them but dumb mistakes have been made by gov officials for not planing ahead and being to generous with entitlements or raises and what not had they worked right from the beginning things wouldn’t be messed up and apple probably would have US manufacturing plants. Over paid my ass know both my parents are union members in NY and they still can’t afford a house in a decent neighborhood I went to public school and so did all my cousins and siblings we all went to city run colleges and I’m going to a city run graduate program y so I am not drowning in debt when I graduate. The last thing we need is a bunch of rich companies giving an avg salary of 8.00 an hr that might get a nice apt in no where USA but not every where it was estimated that the avg salary in NY poverty line be raised to mid 60 grand. Far above the federal 20 something so yes that’s why bus drivers get paid so much or a sanitation worker cuz If not they would have to build a super train from arizona to live nice and travel lol but hey both the private sector and gov has no idea how to work together and put the common interest of the avg citizen as the number 1 priority maybe that cat speech on greed was right on target but no one likes a Debbie downer lol this site is only good when they talk about computers and not the economy or society.
Union is for lazy fat as$ piece of shit, Union is THE problem.
Do we want ” Intel Inside ” ?
I wonder how Intel is going to handle all the toxic wastes associated with chips manufacturing…
http://www.faceintel.com
4000 jobs to construct
5 regular jobs to run the automated factory
via a T1 line to China
That’s a lot of potato chips.
Just pointing out that Apple DID “man-up”, quite recently, by building a giant server farm in NC. Not manufacturing but it certainly created jobs in building it and now running it.