Intel allegedly pays fab engineers up to 500,000 euros in severance pay
Cost-cutting measures at Intel also affect the semiconductor plants. The sale of the ARM shares is more of a symbolic nature.
Insight into Intel's Irish semiconductor plant. This is where Intel uses its latest production technology.
(Image: Intel)
Intel's wave of redundancies of at least 15,000 jobs apparently also affects engineers at its own semiconductor plants. The Irish Business Post reports on lavish severance packages for long-suffering employees at the Leixlip site in Ireland.
Intel operates one of its most modern semiconductor plants there, also known as Fabs. Apart from the research plant in Oregon, USA, which has a lower production capacity, the company only produces Intel 4 and Intel 3 chips in Leixlip, including the compute dies of the Meteor Lake processor family (Core Ultra 100) and the Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids server CPUs.
According to the report, those who leave voluntarily will receive five full weeks' salary per year of service as severance pay. In addition, there is the statutory severance payment of two weeks' salary per year of service, but with an upper limit of 600 euros per week. Depending on which is more applicable, the upper limit is said to be 104 weekly salaries or 500,000 euros.
Underutilization of the fabs
Intel is currently unable to utilize its own semiconductor plants to capacity: the company is having more and more chips produced externally by chip contract manufacturer TSMC, which currently has the more advanced production technology with the N3 family. In the case of the upcoming Lunar Lake notebook processors (Core Ultra 200V), all compute dies even come from TSMC.
Intel had to admit the underutilization of its semiconductor plants when announcing its latest business figures. Intel Foundry – as the restructured manufacturing division is called – made an operating loss of 2.83 billion US dollars.
Things are only expected to pick up with the Intel 18A production generation. The company then wants to overtake TSMC again in terms of the best technical manufacturing process. Intel is also expecting the first major wave of external customers. Series production is scheduled to start at the end of 2025; large volumes are then expected in 2026.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said at the analyst conference: "It is clear that there will be a lot of 'external tiles' [editor's note: dies for Intel processors manufactured at TSMC] in 2025. We'll bring them home in 2026. From then on, we'll really see the benefits of the model we've introduced. Tiles coming home, leading process technology, leading products. 25 launch, deliver 'big-time' in 2026 and beyond."
Videos by heise
From an accounting perspective, it is obviously worth reducing the workforce during the bridging period. The upcoming fab in Magdeburg will not be affected by this for the time being. Operations there are not due to start until the end of 2027 – by which time the current crisis should be over. In any case, the semiconductor industry is highly cyclical.
In addition to reducing its workforce, Intel also wants to rethink its investments and consolidate them if necessary. Intel recently sold its stake in architecture designer ARM – 1.18 million shares –, for example. Based on the stock market price, it is clear that the sale did not even bring in 200 million US dollars.
Empfohlener redaktioneller Inhalt
Mit Ihrer Zustimmung wird hier ein externer Preisvergleich (heise Preisvergleich) geladen.
Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit können personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen (heise Preisvergleich) übermittelt werden. Mehr dazu in unserer Datenschutzerklärung.
(mma)
