Intel Layoffs: Is Future U.S. Chip Independence in Trouble

https://spectrum.ieee.org/chips-act-and-intel

by rbanffy • 2 years ago

62 117 2 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

mepian5• 2 years ago

Can the US government nationalize Intel in the worst-case scenario?

bitmasher93• 2 years ago

Can they? Maybe. Will they? No. Besides, how would it actually help.

michaelt• 2 years ago

Some people think countries should keep a certain amount of certain industries around, regardless of whether they can be run profitably, just in case a big war breaks out and you need those things and can't source them from abroad.

A government might keep things like shipyards in business, even if they can't compete in the global market, just in case we ever need a rush order of new warships. And keep steel mills in business to supply the shipyards, and so on.

Because modern weapon systems need modern integrated circuits, if there was the political desire the state could keep Intel on life support forever.

lizknope4• 2 years ago

The US government would be even worse than Intel at running their business.

The more likely scenario is that the US govt declares Intel "too big to fail" and they give them a bunch of money. They are already doing that through the CHIPS Act.

catproc5• 2 years ago

My favorite part of this is how not only do we kick the can down the road, but the executives also get even more money. I assume that's their favorite part, too.

mdasen2• 2 years ago

Sort-of. You can't just take without just compensation so it'd probably cost the government $200B (you can't buy a whole company just at its market cap).

But when what? OK, you've nationalized Intel. All the same people are working at Intel. You've bought Intel, but you haven't really changed anything. GovernmentIntel faces all the same problems that Intel faced like high US wages and having been behind on EUV lithography.

The biggest problem with Intel is that it ignored EUV for a decade hoping to save money. If the US nationalized Intel in 2012 and the government said "you're going to invest in EUV," then Intel would be in a different place today. Nationalizing Intel in 2024 wouldn't really do much. They've already changed course and should have High NA EUV chips out years before TSMC.

Of course, the US could have also just said "we'll offer billions if you invest in EUV fabs in the US" back in 2012.

I guess the question is: what does nationalizing Intel give you? It gives you control, but you also basically already have control if you're willing to give them money - and nationalizing companies typically costs more than incentives.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

Sadly it has been from the beginning. Companies in the US only care about profits, not about what is good for the Country they are in. And in reality that is how capitalism works.

Pouring money into these companies will do nothing. What is needed is laws with real punishment for the Company and maybe the CEOs. IIRC, there was a time were all defense contractors had to be 100% sourced in the US, not now.

So I would say a law like this: "70% of all products you sell and all the components must be 100% built in the US. If not, you are fine of 30% of your pretax worldwide revenue, including international subsidiaries". If you leave the US, you will be nationalized.

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

Advanced economies simply don't work like this. You cannot have an entire generation raised with the mantra "You must go to college. Take loans. Go to college" and then expect to have a strong blue collar work force. I went to college to sit at a desk at home and get a salary, not commute to a job site and make an hourly.

And even without the mantra, who the hell wants to be the skilled technician working 60 hours a week in a clean lab to push out top quality silicon, when they can be the skilled SWE fiddling with a login page for twice the pay, from their home office, for 30 hours a week?

If you break it down, it becomes more and more of an irreconcilable problem.

rahkiin2• 2 years ago

Why, in your example, is the technician working 60 hours or being paid hourly? Why cannot a technician work 40 hours on a salary?

fragmede• 2 years ago

because different people like to do different things? twice the pay is a benefit, sure, but then you have to sit in front of screen all day long staring at it. Some people wanna work with their hands, and really don't want to sit in front of a screen, no matter how much you pay them. some people even forgo a livable amount of pay, and choose the starving artist route.

not everyone optimizes for pay, nor do they have the ability or aptitude or even desire to become a software engineer.

catproc5• 2 years ago

Yeah, I'm not ready to blame it all on college kids just yet. They're not the ones firing employees to do stock buybacks.

quantum_state• 2 years ago

IMHO, it’s the government which should understand how capitalism works and to not try interfere with the market …

AtlasBarfed4• 2 years ago

You notice how the right (or really any politician or think tank blabber) doesn't trump the "free market" anymore? It used to be every other minute on CNN in the 1990s and 2000s.

Why is that? Well, pretty simple, the corporate powers have all largely settled into cartel, duopoly, or outright monopoly alignments within their markets. Market competition is pretty weak in the US, and it is hurting our competitiveness worldwide.

The reality is that the nth-iterative stability of "free markets" in the real world with barriers to entry and even more important, regulatory capture, is cartel in best case.

A lot of the centralization of wealth in the US is through the large cartel megacorporations. Using those, the "elite" can extract wealth and wage war on labor costs, which goddamn they LOVE to do, more than shirk taxes. Oh, and the megacorporations also enable massive tax avoidance (loans on existing unrealized stock value as a great example).

So what the government SHOULD be doing is antitrust right and left, and breaking up all these monopolies and cartels. It would inject a huge amount of labor demand (at good job wages), a huge amount of anti-inflationary competition, and produce massive amounts of innovation, since you'd have a dozen companies trying different products and production methods in markets, as opposed to ... two.

Animats2• 2 years ago

The US doesn't make much consumer electronics. How can it remain in ICs?

Someday, Foxconn will figure out that it doesn't need Apple any more.

xadhominemx• 2 years ago

You think Foxconn is going to get into the commodity android smartphone business? Compete with Xiaomi for single digit market share at zero margin?

AtlasBarfed4• 2 years ago

Pick your economy-ending force in China:

- Xi's cult of personality and curtailing of capitalism

- A Taiwan invasion attempt that brings massive blockades and boycotts

- Demographic collapse from decades of poor fecundity

- Financial house of cards / property crisis

Zeihan used to be a cuckoo clock of saying this stuff every year, but recently most of the poo-pooers have gone quiet and even started saying things that quietly agree with him, so I think China doomism is entering mainstream policy planning.

China is undeniably being far more militaristic and aggressive in recent years, and this combined with the COVID shock has led to a large rethink in policy and a questioning of outsource manufacturing reaching the point of sharp security concerns.

Globalization being "over" is debatable, but the notion that the world is in a post-war "new history" is dead with the Ukraine war and China's increasing aggression.

Animats2• 2 years ago

The underlying big effect is that countries that are industrializing can grow economically at about 10% per year by copying the advanced countries. When they catch up, growth drops to about where their new peers are, because the fast catch-up phase is done. Happened to all the "Asian tigers" - Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore. Now it's happening to China. Normal part of progress. Good summary in "How Asia Works", by Studwell.

Everybody has a property overbuilding crisis. "Build it and they will come" seems to be a universal for developers. What matters is how they come back from it. Japan took about three decades. The US took about three years.

kamaal• 2 years ago

>Xi's cult of personality and curtailing of capitalism

The president of China is just a glorified code reviewer to some policies made by policy agency bodies. Sure he commands lots of political control over the broad contours of those policies, but nevertheless the control is limited.

What matters is making the right decisions, regardless of whichever 'ism' camp they belong to. Just do what is right, and what it takes to win.

This is seems to be more like a guiding principle behind whatever China does. During Deng era they redefined what communism means, they keep redefining communism as whatever they have to do to win.

Which in itself is a strange thing. They don't seem to care all that much ideologies, or anything for that matter. Only winning and what it takes to win seems like their ideology.

>A Taiwan invasion attempt that brings massive blockades and boycotts

Another great part about China seems to be a stubborn refusal to fight wars. Which is a very scary thing if you think about it. The USA has perfected one weapon in all its existence, and its biggest nemesis is inert to it.

By and large they are just minimising going down decision trees that end in failure.

>Demographic collapse from decades of poor fecundity

Tall order. Every one's fertility rate is declining. More importantly due to proliferation of AI and automation, this is actually a welcome thing. Lesser the mouths to feed, lesser instability when the machines inevitably take over.

darby_nine2• 2 years ago

Apple seems to be just as much a player as Intel.

verdverm• 2 years ago

Apple designs chips, but does not print them as Intel does (both)

mepian5• 2 years ago

Apple's shareholders would riot if the company started building its own semiconductor fabs.

AtlasBarfed4• 2 years ago

Moore's SECOND law is the big kicker here.

The cost of a current top end fab is astronomical for experienced semiconductor companies. There is no "skunkworks" to get a top end fab going.

The real prayer is that Moore's FIRST law / node shrinks run fundamentally out of steam in producing efficiency or speed results, and that gives the entire industry time to optimize and drop fab equipment costs for near-top-end fab performance. This may actually start to happen in the next 5-10 years.

bitmasher93• 2 years ago

There’s a big difference between designing chips and manufacturing chips. The concern here is Intel is the last US HQ CPU fab that matters, and its relevance is waning.

darby_nine2• 2 years ago

The concern here is Intel is the last US HQ CPU fab that matters, and its relevance is waning.

I gave up on US fabs a long time ago; are they really that relevant to begin with outside of paying lip-service to those concerned about offshoring manufacturing jobs? We just went through (and are continuing to experience) a chip crunch and it's not like Intel came through despite having a domestic fab.

AnotherGoodName3• 2 years ago

The thing that will surprise a lot of people is how low Intel pay is in the USA.

Just look up Hardware Engineer Intel on Payscale or other wage comparison site. Other companies are paying 50% more for the equivalent level. Eg. "Intel Bay Area Hardware Engineer salary" level 5 vs entry level "Google/Meta/Nvidia/AMD/Apple hardware engineer salary". On a direct, with no PPP or similar conversion comparison they do pay more for Bay Area talent than TSMC does for talent in Taiwan but Taiwan has significantly lower costs of living so you really wouldn't be better off even as talent in Taiwan migrating for an Intel job.

There's no way Intel is getting the best talent nor has it been for a long time. They do not compete in the slightest and they haven't in a long time. They do not even come close. Oh and they are doing layoffs of the cheapest hardware engineering workforce in the USA right now. Lets see how this pans out for them.

jp42• 2 years ago

100% agree on pay. Also Intel is ossified, there is less and less team where you are held accountable. Empire building is rampant. One of the fundamental thing missing is vision and how each team is relate to that vision.

BobbyJo• 2 years ago

A friend left his SWE position at Intel(He was part of the Altera acquisition) about 4 years ago. His weeks consisted of answering one email on Monday and working out the rest of the work week because his lead did pretty much nothing, and their manager not only did nothing, but made shit up regularly.

It was pretty wild honestly.

snapcaster2• 2 years ago

Was it always like this? Or did they have a period where they stopped paying top dollar for talent?

lovethevoid• 2 years ago

Since the mid 2010s at least. It was common then that Intel would expect far greater for less pay than others. They're also known for paying half than the market rate for contract work too.

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

The truth is that hardware just plain sucks compared to software. More punishing to produce and less profitable to do so. Nobody with money really wants to back hardware over software, at least right now.

polalavik3• 2 years ago

Ya it’s simple economics unfortunately (I’m a hardware engineer). Software can pay more because the cost to produce is lower and so the margins are higher. Hardware has abysmal margins - design, r&d, failure, debugging, schedule push back, component cost, supply chain logistics, warehousing, manufacturing, etc… the list goes on there’s a million things eating into the bottom line.

2o384u• 2 years ago

It took me several years to figure this out. And then several more years to do enough software side projects to build a full software résumé and get hired as a software engineer. The work is definitely less fun, but I almost tripled my TC overnight.

warkdarrior• 2 years ago

Somehow Nvidia scrapes by...

AnotherGoodName3• 2 years ago

Fwiw the low wages of Intel are in comparison of hardware engineering roles directly.

So yes hardware engineering pays less but hardware engineering at Intel is another very large step lower than other hardware engineering jobs.

dopylitty• 2 years ago

In other words in the US economic system it pays better to sell ads than to try to produce an actual tangible product.

That says more about the economic system than it does about Intel.

lizknope4• 2 years ago

I work for a fabless semiconductor company in the US.

We have hired a lot of people from Intel over the last 5 years and the main reason they leave and join us is because we pay more.

Apple and Nvidia pay even more than us so we lose people to them.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

Is Intel's pay low or has the FAANG infinite-money glitch fucked up the talent market?

AnotherGoodName3• 2 years ago

I'd say the pay is on the low side even when comparing outside the FAANG. Globally tech wages went up but Intel didn't budge due to long standing poor financial performance (see stock price since 2000) leading to a slow rot of their core strength.

In a direct dollar to dollar conversion Intel in the Bay Area (the highest paying location) pays pretty much exactly 2x in raw salary for equivalent levels to TSMC roles based in Taiwan. That might sound like a pro-Intel comment but the simple fact is that it's a lot cheaper to live in Taiwan. 2x Taiwanese wages are not going to entice anyone to move to the highest cost of living region in the world. TSMC clearly has amazing talent and Intel are not only failing to compete against the other US tech giants, they can't even entice from lower wage regions of the world right now.

It's pretty obvious that there's talent Intel needs and if we want to onshore the production from Taiwan we need that talent but Intel isn't coming close.

kyledrake4• 2 years ago

This 10000000%. They treat their employees like shit. Intel lost literally their entire red team to Oracle of all places over (at least) pay. Intel has a complete joke pay system that is like something out of the 1950s, underpays substantially and docks that already low pay based on certain qualifications like having a college degree (sorry Steve Jobs!).

I have zero interest as a taxpayer in bailing out their crappy company, let it fail or succeed on its own merits like the companies all of their employees moved to because they were better at retaining staff. Modernize your staffing system to hire competitively or die.

KK7NIL11• 2 years ago

The "companies all of their employees moved to" don't make leading edge semiconductors with US based R&D, so I don't know why you're acting like they'd be able to do what Intel does.

This isn't about Intel, it's about keeping US companies competitive in leading edge semiconductor manufacturing. If we let Intel fail, we'd have an even tougher battle to get some other US company to compete.

onepointsixC6• 2 years ago

While I agree their comp is abysmal, if Intel fails America is completely screwed. TSMC will never place leading edge in America and Beijing has the most advanced fabs in the world, which they’re already largely blocked from using, in rocket artillery range. None of our software roles mean anything if we don’t have hardware to run it on.

osnium1236• 2 years ago

I think Intel is more competitive for process engineers and semiconductor manufacturing engineers from a compensation perspective.

Chiba-City• 2 years ago

Our legacy "computer industry" was a lend/lease styled business model industry. Our legacy "computer companies" were financing companies. Not "computing" companies. That lends/lease financing business model justified the sales forces operating on commissions. All that is over now.

Everything has changed now. Computer automation (CPU, RAM, Storage, I/O) is now priced in the mere 100's of dollars. That signifies "stuff" you can buy at Best Buy or even 7/11. Stuff you can "buy" signifies "stuff" that cannot be sold on commission. There is no more role for financing (lend/lease). There are no roles for sales forces operating on commissions.

I love bits and bytes. So what? Follow the money.

polalavik3• 2 years ago

What? We are talking about a major IC designer/manufacturer not gateway desktop computers from 1999.

Theres still tons of money to be made in chips - the whole world runs on them. but the cost is in the multi-multi-billion dollar r&d to build a fab that actually makes functional chips. And then having the work force that can produce successful yield after successful yield 24/7 that keeps the economics of the whole thing on par with Taiwan and other major supply chain countries in the indo-pacific where wages are lower.

bitmasher93• 2 years ago

What matters the most is the product. Intel has had a serious of serious problems on that front over the last decade. From product delays, to Speculative Execution security concerns, to oxidation/voltage issues. Meanwhile their competition has been absolutely killing it, to the point where their X86 moat is collapsing. Their major software partner, Microsoft, is spending $$$ to open the option to work with other vendors. The fact that Apple successfully walked away is a major advantage for MacOS over Windows.

All the tax incentives, all of the trade deals, all of the weight of the federal government won’t matter as long as Intel continues to produce inferior products. Now they have 15% fewer minds to work with. In twenty years it won’t matter if Intel is still operating fabs or not, the chips will be so far behind all the serious workloads will be on other silicon.

ptdorf• 2 years ago

What matters the most is the product.

This ^^

I went from a Intel MacBook Pro that can boil eggs to a M2 silent, efficient killer machine.

KK7NIL11• 2 years ago

Atkinson says that while the CHIPS Act is a start, the United States is likely to need additional funding, support, or incentives if the goal is to see competitive leading-edge semiconductor fabs owned by U.S. corporations. “We’ve hit a double in the first inning, and that’s pretty good,” he says. “But the problem is everybody in Washington thinks we’re done.”

This is the problem.

Asia has seen semiconductor manufacturing as a strategic investment and so setup long term benefits, subsidies and education programs. They also have leadership that stays in power long enough to see these plans through.

Meanwhile the US has been enjoying the easy gains of SW companies juiced up on low interest rates (which leads to inflation, which favors industries that require very little capex). Finally people are realizing that we still need HW companies but all we get is a one off band-aid solution, just enough for the industry to survive until the next election.

It really is like the old joke that Asia is playing go while the US is playing chess (strategic vs tactical thinking).

riku_iki• 2 years ago

if the goal is to see competitive leading-edge semiconductor fabs owned by U.S. corporations.

I think another efficient goal would be to invite politically friendly asian companies to build fabs in US.

Not clear if US companies can catch up at this point.

KK7NIL11• 2 years ago

Not clear if US companies can catch up at this point.

I'm biased as I'm working on 18A at Intel but I'm very optimistic for this node. We could leapfrog TSMC (this is all public information). And in the last few years Intel speedran 4 nodes to catch up, which was quite the feat.

I think another efficient goal would be to invite politically friendly asian companies to build fabs in US.

This was part of the CHIPS act too (which I think shows how scattered the US semiconductor policy is), TSMC and Samsung got money to do exactly that.

osnium1236• 2 years ago

One thing that Asian governments have insisted on is export discipline. Companies could only get grants, loans, etc if they exported their goods. The idea is to force domestic producers to be good enough to be competitive internationally. How does one make sure that the US chip manufacturing industry stay competitive without this sort of export discipline?

KK7NIL11• 2 years ago

That policy made sense for Asia because they got their start through technology transfer agreements. This policy ensured that these agreements weren't just thinly veiled attempts to bypass import tariffs and were actually commercially viable in the global market.

How does one make sure that the US chip manufacturing industry stay competitive without this sort of export discipline?

If we keep low tariffs on SK and Taiwan, I don't see how a domestic manufacturer has any choice but to compete in the global market, removing the need for this export requirement. This is part of why US semiconductor manufacturers have had a hard time competing with Asia, especially in commodity semiconductors (i.e. memory and packaging the first to get off-shored).

BlarfMcFlarf• 2 years ago

Companies that want bailouts, if they are of national interest, should get those in exchange for partial ownership. When private ownership fails, national funds should come with national controls.

snapcaster2• 2 years ago

Agreed, I'm willing to concede the point that any great power needs a chip industry but I hate my money getting put into the incinerator that is modern Intel with no strings attached

philwelch• 2 years ago

This is how the GM bailout was structured, though the government ended up selling their stake in GM after it was rebuilt.

Based on the performance of the companies that the US government does own, this seems like a really bad idea in general. Amtrak has been a money pit for special interests for decades and the USPS is only profitable because they have a legally protected monopoly they constantly abuse to shove spam into the same mailbox where I occasionally receive bills and jury summons (to the point where my USPS service is easily at least 90% spam).

mdasen2• 2 years ago

It's also how the bank bailouts were structured. They weren't free money. They were loans plus government ownership (which the government typically sold off for a nice profit). The loans were typically 5% which would rise to 9% after the first five years.

People talk about the bailouts like they were free money and say things like "the government should bail out ordinary people." The reality is that they weren't favorable terms - but reasonable enough that the banks wouldn't fight taking the money. The government wanted to stabilize the banking system (and automakers) and it wasn't totally clear who would need money. For example, how much money do you need over the next month? Well, that depends on factors you don't know about. Maybe you have a medical emergency or some other unexpected thing happen. So the government wanted the banks to accept the money rather than say "nah, we think we can weather the storm" and then fail creating more chaos.

If the government had said "we'll give you $10 and own half your company," no bank would have accepted that. Instead, it was typically structured as preferred shares (essentially a loan) offering 5% interest for the first 5 years and 9% after that plus warrants for ownership of the companies equivalent to 15% of the money invested. When the financial system stabilized, the banks typically repaid the loans and bought the warrants from the government.

For example, with Citibank, the government gave them $45B and made a $12B profit 2 years later - a 27% increase over 2 years. That's pretty good. With General Motors, the government gave them $13.4B in exchange for $2.1B in preferred shares and 61% ownership of the company.

People act like they got free money, but that simply wasn't the case. The government got a reasonable deal on that money, especially given that they were trying to force the banks to accept it. Some believed that they could go without the help and that the "bailout" terms weren't in their best interest. They didn't want to make a deal while their value was low since the government would be getting a lot for their buck. But the government's terms were reasonable enough that some cajoling got them to accept it.

I mean, Citigroup went from $900B in July 2007 to $400B in July 2008 to $50B in January 2009 (and around $85B when the government sold its ownership in 2010). Citi did need the bailout and the US government ended up with 36% ownership. Citi clearly wouldn't have sold 100% of the company to the government for $5B in 2008 or 2009. At that point, you might as well roll the dice and take your chances. The government gave Citi $45B and got $22.2B back as cash from Citi and 36% of the company (basically, 36% of Citi for $22.8B). Note: when you buy large chunks of companies, you don't get the market price. As you buy more shares, you get to investors unwilling to sell at that price and the price goes up. Maybe 1% of shareholders might be willing to sell at $50B, but then some will believe they should hold rather than sell. So the government didn't get a bad deal.

shortrounddev22• 2 years ago

Isn't AMD an American company

edit: I guess they don't manufacture their own chips though

rahkiin2• 2 years ago

Amd does not have a fab. Intel does have a fab.

mepian5• 2 years ago

What’s interesting is that AMD used to have a fab… then it was spun off… then it gave up on keeping up with TSMC's latest nodes. Possibly for the same reasons Intel is struggling right now.

lizknope4• 2 years ago

AMD spun their fabs off as Global Foundries in 2009

Then in 2014 IBM "sold" their fab division to GF but IBM actually paid GF $1.5 billion to take them.

shortrounddev22• 2 years ago

If Intel somehow needed to sell its hardware, could the US block any sales to non-US based companies?

KK7NIL11• 2 years ago

Just to add to that: AMD did used to make their own chips, but spun it off as GlobalFoundry many years ago to avoid bankruptcy when times got tough.

GF was on the leading edge for a long time and even had EUV machines but actually decided to send them back to ASML and stop chasing the leading edge due to lack of capital.

Since then, Intel has been the only US based company on the leading edge.

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

I don’t have any mind for policy. Law just seems like very confusing hyper-spaghetti code.

But, I really hope the CHIPS act is well-targeted.

We don’t need Intel, the chip designers, anymore. I mean, their chips are fine basically, or maybe they aren’t so great, whatever, they can still sell them, I don’t care.

But we absolutely and desperately need a chip foundry company and if IFS can be that, they deserve a chance (and are probably the best bet we’ve got, unless somebody can convince TSMC to send us some folks, but that seems pretty unlikely).

AtlasBarfed4• 2 years ago

Intel has 10 wafer fabs worldwide. Yes, not all of them are at maximally modern nodes...

But here's an idea. Let's spin off Intel's fabs not into one company, but two. Get a little anti-trust and market competition to go with the CHIPS investment.

Intel won't like it, but make the CHIPS funding dependent on it.

Yes I know, no way that gets out of congress intact.

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

It would be a fascinating experiment if we could try it safely somehow. Break up Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon and watch their various parts try and figure out how to make money. A world in which I can buy a Graviton chip fabbed in the US by IFS, and then consider installing Windows on it (nah, but it would be nice to have the option) would be really neat.

osnium1236• 2 years ago

I don’t think the economics can support running two different development teams in the US. The latest EUV tools cost $400M for example.

onepointsixC6• 2 years ago

Who will be their customers? Intel’s woes are all because their fabs fell behind, if they were fabless they would just go to TSMC. Global foundries could keep up and had to give up on leading edge. Without Intel as their own customers Intel fabs will die.

catproc5• 2 years ago

Law is not code, and any comparisons are mostly incorrect, and displays a misunderstanding of legal philosophy.

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

But if you profess enough ignorance of law, you can usually dodge conversations about legal philosophy.

osnium1236• 2 years ago

TSMC is spending $65B in Arizona so the US at least gets a big fab out of it.

onepointsixC6• 2 years ago

It’s trailing edge. TSMC is doing it to soak up subsidies, deny it to others and avoid stick policy solutions. But they will never put leading edge outside of Taiwan, and should they become a true monopoly with Intel and Samsung throwing in the towels then it will become very unpleasant.

catproc5• 2 years ago

Have we tried more stock buybacks and layoffs? Will that help?

disqard• 2 years ago

While snarky, I think your comment is incisive.

It might be a little bit "on the nose", kinda like "speaking ill of the dead" too soon. Intel is not yet interred...

Interesting to see how Intel's hubris has painted it into a corner. Will the US govt. consider it "too big to fail" and infuse it with more cash as needed? Time will tell.

P.S. If the govt. does provide cash, what will prevent some future CEO from short-term juicing the stock using that cash, collecting a big paycheck (and running away before the stuff hits the rotary object?)

Intel Layoffs: Is Future U.S. Chip Independence in Trouble

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