Text/JING Audit/Zi Yang Correction/Zhi Qiu
Affected by the rise of emerging industries such as 5G and new energy vehicles, the demand for the chip market has increased sharply, and wafer foundries have successively made expanding production capacity the first task.
Among them, Intel can be described as menacing. After the new CEO went public, he directly announced that it would take five years to catch up with TSMC and later make chips for Apple.
To this end, Intel not only invested heavily in the construction of advanced wafer foundries in the United States, but also took the initiative to seek financial assistance from relevant departments in Europe and the United States, planning to take this opportunity to change the situation of too much concentration of wafer foundries in Asia.
On January 21, Intel announced its first plant construction plan for 2022. It is reported that Intel will invest $20 billion to build a new chip factory in Ohio, USA.
Not only that, according to Reuters, Intel also intends to set up a technology research and development center in Ohio. Counting other projects, in 2022, Intel will build eight factories at the same time, with a total investment of 100 billion US dollars.
In fact, Intel's performance in 2021 is not good, and among the world's top ten semiconductor manufacturers, Intel's performance growth rate is the first from the bottom. Although with the "old book", it has retained the second position in the world. However, due to technology and production capacity constraints, Intel's PC processor market share continues to be divided by AMD, and the development prospects are worrying.
In this context, Intel wants to return to the world's first, and can only bet on the wafer foundry business. If the foundry technology can be upgraded according to Intel's plan, Intel can use the 2nm process to create its own processor in 2025, and AMD chips will no longer have process advantages.
Moreover, because Intel has the ability to produce chips independently, it also has more initiative in the market, which is conducive to regaining market share.
In addition, Intel upgrades technology, increases production capacity, and allows itself to get more chip orders, which will determine whether Intel can return to the position of the world's first semi-leading manufacturer.
In fact, as far as technology is concerned, the author is not optimistic about Intel's anti-TSMC. After all, the Intel process process has not yet broken through 7nm, and TSMC 3nm technology is ready, if the next few years TSMC technology stagnates, Intel chip process ignores Moore's law gradually fail, steadily upgraded. Intel will achieve 2nm in 2025, which is also not a small difficulty.
Most importantly, even if Intel catches up with TSMC in technology, the gap between Intel's production capacity and TSMC cannot be bridged in the short term. You know, when Intel established a new factory, TSMC was also expanding its production capacity, and TSMC was expanding production globally, and the capacity increase was even greater. This not only allows TSMC to bind more new international customers, but also makes the relationship between TSMC and old customers closer.
In fact, for TSMC's large customers, the reason why it is very important to choose TSMC FOUNDC chips is that in addition to TSMC, other manufacturers in the market are difficult to meet the supply demand.
However, even if Intel is slightly inferior to TSMC in terms of technology, production capacity, customers, etc., Intel is not without the opportunity to turn over. In fact, Intel is well prepared.
Intel can not only continue to expand production capacity, but also in preparation for technology upgrades, some time ago, Armex announced that the latest model of EUV lithography machine has been bought by Intel, the equipment can produce 2nm process chips, production efficiency and yield rate compared to the old model lithography machine increased significantly.
Of course, the price of the new generation of lithography machines compared to the old generation of products to a large range, and Intel does not hesitate to buy, in fact, it is also to show the attitude of returning to the chip market to the outside world, in your opinion, Intel can catch up with TSMC in 2025 as they envision?