Intel Gets Green Light for $4 Billion Irish Chip Plant

Ireland's An Bord Pleanála has given Intel the necessary permission for a new chip plant in County Kildare, just outside Ireland's capital city of Dublin. The Leixlip, Kildare campus is just one location where Intel plans to produce its next gen 14nm microprocessors.

Intel first announced plans to start a new $500 million construction project at its Leixlip technology campus in January of 2011. The plan was to upgrade Intel's Fab 14 facility in Leixlip. At the time, the project promised to create 850 construction jobs as well as 200 high level jobs on the Leixlip campus when all was said and done. SiliconRepublic reports that, last week, An Bord Pleanála granted Intel the planning permission to go ahead with the redevelopment. However, the estimates of how many jobs this new facility will create have risen considerably, as has the cost of the investment from Intel.

According to SiliconRepublic, the $4 billion plant will require a total of 3,500 construction workers over a period of two years and 800 permanent workers once completed. The new facility will include a new semiconductor wafer fabrication facility measuring 244,000 square meters (this will be housed inside the existing manufacturing complex), a three-storey main fabrication facility with a floor area of 101,000 sq metres, and several other facility support buildings for waste and chemical storage, water treatment, and more.

Contact Us for News Tips, Corrections and Feedback               

  • wintermint
    Be nice if we stop outsourcing to different country to save money. The US economy would have benefit from this :(
    Reply
  • jezzjc
    wintermintBe nice if we stop outsourcing to different country to save money. The US economy would have benefit from this
    Because f*ck other countries economies...
    Reply
  • patrick47018
    Sweet, too bad it couldn't of been in 'murica
    Reply
  • manofchalk
    Trying to come up with a joke on Irish Intel chips being lucky, cant think of anything...
    Reply
  • neon neophyte
    don't feel too bad guys, 2 of the 14nm plants are in the United States of America. Only 1 is located elsewhere, and that is this one.
    Reply
  • omnimodis78
    wintermintBe nice if we stop outsourcing to different country to save money. The US economy would have benefit from thisWrong! It's time to stop outsource to countries where labour is at slave-wage levels (China, Mexico, India, etc.), but "outsourcing" to Europe is a very good thing overall. It's a very precisely understood situation in macroeconomics. Things start getting really bad (for us, the West) when we have to start competing for jobs that we wouldn't do for less than, say, $15/hr with people in (example) China where same job pays $2/hr.

    BTW nice that you edited your original comment haha - now mine doesn't quite make sense...but it did before you edited yours.
    Reply
  • sixdegree
    I expect the Irish Intel CPU will be bundled with a heatsink, a fan, and a pint of guinness.
    Reply
  • house70
    While Samsung opens up fabs in Texas... Go figure.
    Reply
  • A Bad Day
    wintermintBe nice if we stop outsourcing to different country to save money. The US economy would have benefit from this
    Maybe the Irish has more and better engineers than we do...

    Minus the drinking of course.
    Reply
  • Shin-san
    wintermintBe nice if we stop outsourcing to different country to save money. The US economy would have benefit from thisIntel is making a plant in New York, along with a lot of other companies.
    Reply