Intel’s Latest Hail Mary Is a $20 Billion Bet on American Manufacturing
The chipmaker helped create Silicon Valley—but cultural complacency and a missed mobile boom have left it far behind competitors.
The statement, conveyed as the third bullet point of a quarterly earnings release, was both mind-numbingly technical and inscrutably terse—almost to the point of meaninglessness for anyone who was not a professional investor or analyst. “Accelerating 10nm product transition,” it read, “7nm product transition delayed versus prior expectations.”
To those who do make a living scrutinizing financial releases, this was disastrous. It meant that Intel Corp. was struggling to produce its latest and greatest chips. The company had promised it would be manufacturing chips with transistors that have dimensions as small as 7 nanometers, or 7 billionths of a meter, with 2021 as the most recent deadline. The smaller the transistors, the more you can cram together, which makes for faster or more efficient processors. The delay meant that Intel would be stuck selling an older generation of chips for another year.