Ohio One Construction Timeline Update

TSMC is kind of a miraculous thing, decoupling the manufacture from design, letting anyone come up with a chip they want to build. I would hope they could have competition, but Intel can’t afford to give up the chip market and therefore competes with its own customers. They’re stuck in the trap created by their market dominance.

It's not clear from the press release, but the timeline shifted first from 2025, then to 2027 and now to 2030/2031:

  > The semiconductor manufacturer originally estimated its first factory would come online in 2025. Then, it bumped the grand opening to 2027. Now, Intel estimates operations will begin at the Ohio One campus somewhere between 2030 and 2031.

The biggest issue is that there isn't sufficient demand for an Intel fab, which is causing them to slow play opening it. Ben Thompson has written at length on Intel's struggles over the years and advocates that the U.S. step in and help guarantee sufficient volume of orders from US customers to make the fab financially work:

  > That leaves Intel and the need for native leading edge capacity, and this is in some respects the hardest problem to solve.

  > First, the U.S. should engineer a spin-off of Intel’s x86 chip business to Broadcom or Qualcomm at a nominal price; the real cost for the recipient company will be guaranteed orders for not just Intel chips but also a large portion of their existing chips for Intel Foundry. This will provide the foundational customer to get Intel Foundry off the ground.

  > Second, the U.S. should offer to subsidize Nvidia chips made at Intel Foundry. Yes, this is an offer worth billions of dollars, but it is the shortest, fastest route to ground the U.S. AI industry in U.S. fabs.

  > Third, if Nvidia declines — and they probably will, given the risks entailed in a foundry change — then the U.S. should make a massive order for Intel Gaudi AI accelerators, build data centers to house them, and make them freely available to companies and startups who want to build their own AI models, with the caveat that everything is open source.

  > Fourth, the U.S. should heavily subsidize chip startups to build at Intel Foundry, with the caveat that all of the resultant IP that is developed to actually build chips — the basic building blocks, that are separate from the “secret sauce” of the chip itself — is open-sourced.

  > Fifth, the U.S. should indemnify every model created on U.S.-manufactured chips against any copyright violations, with the caveat that the data used to train the model must be made freely available.

If it were going well there wouldn't be a "timeline update", "construction progress", nor a photo of a bunch of cranes.