Thread: Intel's new $5 billion plant in Arizona

Intel's new $5 billion plant in Arizona

By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
Updated 11h 53m ago |

CHANDLER, Ariz. — Few people get to step inside a fabrication laboratory, yet here I am in Fab 32 — clad in a bunny suit, looking like an astronaut — shuffling through Intel’s $3.5 billion chipmaking facility in the desert.

It’s an impressive facility, with multimillion-dollar machines book-ended, side by side, in a glitzy assembly line to convert silicon wafers into microprocessors. Devices with names such as Ion Implanter and Lithography bake, etch, layer and smooth wafers so they can be used in everything from PCs to tablet devices to smartphones.

But as impressive as Fab 32 may be, it’s the warm-up act for Fab 42, a new $5 billion chip-manufacturing plant about to go up next door. When finished in 2013, it will be the most advanced high-volume semiconductor manufacturing facility in the world, according to Intel.

Fab 42 is the crown jewel of the most ambitious construction push in a decade for the world’s No. 1 chipmaker. In the next few years, it will pour more than $10 billion into constructing the 1 million-square-foot Fab 42, another manufacturing plant in Hillsboro, Ore., and upgrades to facilities in Arizona, Oregon and New Mexico.

“The big part of my job is when to decide to build a new lab,â€

I guess the Arizona Chamber of Commerce is wrong, Arizona's immigration law is not stopping businesses from setting up shop in the state.