Intel Opens $3.5B Fab 9 Plant In New Mexico To Boost US Chip Production
"Today, we celebrate the opening of Intel’s first high-volume semiconductor operations and the only U.S. factory producing the world’s most advanced packaging solutions at scale. This cutting-edge technology sets Intel apart and gives our customers real advantages in performance, form factor, and flexibility in design applications, all within a resilient supply chain. Congratulations to the New Mexico team, the entire Intel family, our suppliers, and contractor partners who collaborate and relentlessly push the boundaries of packaging innovation."
Indeed, it seems like Fab 9 will be focused on the production of EMIB and Foveros packages. Those are Intel technologies related to chip stacking and multi-chip module design that we've written about at great length before. AMD and TSMC may have led the way in bringing chiplet fabrication to the consumer market, but Intel is full speed ahead on these technologies. Foveros enables chip-on-chip vertical stacking, and it's used in Intel's first-generation tiled consumer processors codenamed Meteor Lake. Those parts just launched last month. We were quite fond of the Core Ultra 7 165H, but opinions around the web varied.
Intel describes the combination of Fab 9 and the extant Fab 11x in the same location as "the first operational site for mass production of Intel's 3D advanced packaging technology," and in the same breath, says that the site is Intel's first "co-located high-volume advanced packaging site." In other words, this one site can create the tiles and then assemble them into finished chips, which should enable much higher production throughput instead of having to ship incomplete parts all over the world.
According to Chipzilla, this $3.5B investment created "hundreds of high-tech Intel jobs, more than 3,000 construction jobs, and an additional 3,500 jobs across the state." As you'd expect, New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) had a comment as well. She noted that Intel "continues to play a key role" in New Mexico. Of course, the $3.5B investment in Rio Rancho pales compared to the $20B investment the company made in Arizona. That site, consisting of Fabs 52 and 62, isn't expected to be ready until later this year.
