I was digging through old bookmarks last night (dont ask, I have a folder called "read later" that is basically a graveyard at this point) and I found the press photos from Intel's big groundbreaking ceremony in Licking County, Ohio, back in 2022. Governor on stage, hard hats, the whole "Silicon Heartland" branding push. Twenty-billion-dollar fab campus, thousands of jobs, chips flowing by 2025. That was the promise.
It's 2025 now. And this week Intel's earnings call basically confirmed what a lot of us who follow this stuff have suspected for a while: Ohio is not happening on anything like that timeline, and the company is shrinking, not growing.
CEO Lip-Bu Tan laid it out on the Q2 call on Thursday. Headcount is coming down to something like 75,000 employees by the end of the year, way down from over 100,000 not that long ago. That's not a rounding error, thats a different company. And the Ohio construction pace is getting stretched even further out, with completion now looking more like the early 2030s than anything resembling "2025" or even "2026." Plans for new fabs in Germany and Poland that were already paused earlier this year are effectively dead.
Heres the part that actually made me sit up: Intel stock went UP on this news. Not despite the layoffs and the delays, because of them. Investors have apparently decided that a smaller, leaner Intel that stops burning cash on speculative capacity is a better bet than a company chasing the "build everything everywhere" strategy from a few years ago. Which, fine, I get the logic from a spreadsheet perspective. But it's a weird thing to watch happen in real time — a company gets rewarded financially for backing away from the exact promises that got it billions in CHIPS Act support and a hero's welcome from state and federal officials.
I dont think Lip-Bu Tan is wrong to cut costs, to be clear. Intel spent the last decade getting outmaneuvered by TSMC on process nodes and outmaneuvered by Nvidia on basically everything involving AI silicon, and you cant fix that by just building more square footage of fab in central Ohio. At some point you have to admit the roadmap was too ambitious for the balance sheet you actually have. That part I respect, even.
What bugs me is the whiplash for the actual towns involved. New Albany and Johnstown, Ohio arent huge places. Local officials rezoned land, school districts planned for enrollment bumps, roads got widened, all on the assumption that this thing was real and on schedule. Now it's "early 2030s, maybe," which in fab-construction-speak often means "we'll see." I've seen this movie before with other mega-projects (looking at you, various Foxconn Wisconsin promises from years back) where the ribbon-cutting photo op happens years before the actual factory does, if it ever does at full scale.
The other detail buried in the coverage that I havent seen many people mention: this is happening the same month CrowdStrike quietly passed the one-year mark since its update took down something like 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide, grounding flights and knocking hospitals offline. Two completely different stories, sure, but there's a thread connecting them for me — a lot of the infrastructure we all depend on is more fragile, more improvised, and more subject to one company's internal cost decisions than the marketing ever lets on. Intel's chips, CrowdStrike's kernel-level update pipeline, whatever, it's all resting on fewer redundant layers than most of us assume day to day.
Anyway. I'm not writing Intel off, I've been burned before predicting doom for companies that then quietly claw their way back (RIP my 2013 blog post confidently declaring Apple's smartwatch idea would flop, that one still haunts me). But if you're the kind of person who tracks semiconductor manufacturing news the way other people track sports scores, this week was a real data point. The map of "where chips get made in the next decade" just got redrawn again, and Ohio's slice of it got smaller before it even really started.
If anyone local to the Licking County area is reading this and has actual eyes on the construction site, I'd genuinely like to know what it looks like out there right now. Email's in the sidebar like always.