Intel to Upgrade New Mexico Factory with $3.5 Billion Investment for Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing

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As the U.S. pushes to gain traction in the global semiconductor market, it’s receiving a boost from technology giant Intel in the form of a major factory investment.

Intel announced May 3 that it will spend $3.5 billion to upgrade equipment at its Rio Rancho, New Mexico, manufacturing campus so that it can produce advanced semiconductor packaging technologies.

The Santa Clara, California-based company said the multi-year project — which is set to begin construction late this year — will add 700 technology jobs. Intel currently has over 1,800 employees at Rio Rancho, where the company has invested more than $16 billion since its operations outside Albuquerque began in 1980.

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said the investment will span three years and “establish the Rio Rancho campus as the company’s domestic hub for advanced semiconductor manufacturing.”

Part of the production in the upgraded facilities will go toward Foveros, a high-performance, three-dimensional integrated circuit face-to-face packaging technology — known in the industry as a chiplet — that Intel introduced in 2019. By enabling the vertical stacking of compute tiles instead of a side-by-side arrangement, Foveros helps electronics designers and manufacturers achieve greater computational performance in a smaller form factor.

The announcement came less than a week after Ford shared that the ongoing global semiconductor shortage would likely cause the automaker to slash its production by about half during the second quarter of this year.

Image Credit: Intel