Intel has pushed back the opening of its two fabs in New Albany, Licking County, Ohio to the early 2030s, half a decade later than originally planned.
Construction on the first factory is now expected to be completed in 2030, allowing the facility to begin operations by the end of 2031, while the second fab now has a completion date of 2031, making it operational by 2032.
The delays were first reported by the Columbus Dispatch, with Intel confirming the new timeline for the $28 billion Ohio One project to the news outlet.
Following the report, Naga Chandrasekaran, executive vice president, chief global operations officer, and general manager of Intel Foundry Manufacturing, wrote a message to employees, updating them on the revised Ohio timeline.
"We are taking a prudent approach to ensure we complete the project in a financially responsible manner that sets up Ohio One for success well into the future," Chandrasekaran wrote. "We will continue construction at a slower pace, while maintaining the flexibility to accelerate work and the start of operations if customer demand warrants, but I want to be upfront and transparent with you all about our current plan."
He added that the delays “in no way” diminish the company’s long-term commitment to Ohio, and that the chipmaker has “already started hiring Ohioans who are training at our fabs in Arizona, New Mexico, and Oregon, and we will continue to scale our hiring as we approach our operational dates.”
Intel confirmed its plan to build the Ohio fab in January 2022, with then CEO Pat Gelsinger saying at the time that the company could spend as much as $100bn on the site over the next decade, a figure that would mark the largest single private investment in the state.
However, this most recent timeline slip is not the first time Intel has pushed back the completion dates for the Ohio One campus. In February 2024, it was reported that construction was not expected to be completed until 2026, a year later than the fabs’ original production date.
Last year, the struggling chipmaker was also forced to halt construction on its facilities in Germany and Poland and cut 15,000 jobs from its global workforce following successive quarters of multi-billion dollar losses.
Despite this, in November 2024, Intel signed an agreement with the Department of Commerce which saw the company awarded $7.865bn in direct funding, to be disbursed based on Intel’s completion of project milestones. According to the company, Intel has received $1.1bn of CHIPS Act funding from the US government in Q4 FY24 and an additional $1.1bn in January of Q1 FY25.
Gelsinger ‘retired’ from Intel in December 2024 and Intel has yet to appoint his successor.
Following reports from earlier this year that Intel’s assets could be carved up and divided between Broadcom and TSMC, former Intel CEO Craig Barrett penned an op-ed in Fortune where he claimed that splitting off its foundry business would not solve the company’s problems, rather Intel should focus all its efforts on developing a technology that would allow it to compete with the Taiwanese chipmaker.
Barrett also took issue with the four former Intel board members who have written their own opinion pieces supporting the split, claiming that while they might have been well-meaning, they are “two academics and two former government bureaucrats” who ultimately didn’t understand the complexities involved with running a semiconductor business.
“The challenge for Intel is to get someone who understands the business of making chips, not someone who spends their time splitting the company into two pieces,” he wrote, adding: “In my opinion, a far better move might be to fire the Intel board and rehire Pat Gelsinger to finish the job he has aptly handled over the past few years.”
