Intel CEO Gelsinger proposes a fab tour for Elon Musk — could be an attempt to win orders from Tesla, other Musk companies

News
By Mark Tyson
published

CHIP Act funding arrives, hastens the need to get IFS customers lined up.

Intel Foundry Services touting for business
(Image credit: Pat Gelsinger on Twitter/X)

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has publicly invited Tesla CEO Elon Musk to tour his firm's semiconductor fab lines. In a post on the Twitter/X social media platform, Gelsinger said he was thinking of Musk when he was awarded the $8.5 billion in CHIPS Act funding, earlier in the week. Gelsinger has also been courting Musk's arch-foe OpenAI / Sam Altman. It is safe to say that the Intel CEO is trying to get an early start in filling the Intel Foundry Services (IFS) order books, now that the financial fuse has been lit.

In Gelsinger's post, embedded above, you can see the Intel CEO reach out personally to Elon Musk, promising him a tour of Intel's high-tech manufacturing lines. Musk didn't respond publicly, yet, but this may be because Gelsinger also asked him to "follow me," so the pair could chat privately via direct messaging (DM).

Musk would surely be an excellent catch for IFS. This superrich entrepreneur has fingers in many tech pies that are highly reliant on processors, lots of state-of-the-art processors. Musk's firms buy AI accelerators from both AMD and Nvidia, for tasks like machine learning, computer vision, self-driving, Grok, and more, but the firm is also developing its own Dojo ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated-Circuits) with new generations in development.

Looking back at other recent Tom's Hardware headlines, we can see Gelsinger has been very actively touting for business in recent weeks. We know the Intel CEO will have been talking to OpenAI's Sam Altman recently. Altman has floated the ambitious $7 trillion idea of OpenAI building its own fabs to make custom AI chips. However, Altman was at the last Intel Foundry event and surely will have mulled over the possibilities of using Intel's upcoming manufacturing capacity, and expertise. Also, last month, Gelsinger reiterated that Intel is willing to build chips for anyone, including long-time rival AMD.

Intel Foundry Services touting for business

(Image credit: Pat Gelsinger on Twitter/X)

On Wednesday, Intel's funding dreams came true as it came to a preliminary agreement with the U.S. Commerce Department. The iconic PC chipmaker will get $8.5 billion in direct funding for U.S. projects, plus $11 billion in low-interest loans and a 25% investment tax credit on up to $100 billion of investment. This is great news for Intel's domestic chipmaking plans covering projects in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon. Perhaps delayed building projects such as the Ohio fab will move forward more swiftly, with fresh funding behind their sails.

Mark Tyson
Mark Tyson
Freelance News Writer

Mark Tyson is a Freelance News Writer at Tom's Hardware US. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Notton
    I think that is a very clever move by Gelsinger.
    Instead of having to outbid other fabs for orders, he can have potential customers compete for fab allotment.
    However, this is assuming the node is competitive.

    Hopefully IFS has something that sells better than Samsung's SF4X or SF3E.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Years ago, I recall Zuckerberg being given a fab tour. It sticks in my memory because, at one point, he did something dumb like remove his face mask in the clean room, and that ruined like a whole batch of wafers.
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    bit_user said:
    Years ago, I recall Zuckerberg being given a fab tour. It sticks in my memory because, at one point, he did something dumb like remove his face mask in the clean room, and that ruined like a whole batch of wafers.
    The wafer are almost always contained in Pods (Self contain isolated carriers), so highly unlikely it did anything but cause contamination control folks some consternation.

    In a mask room, or other highly sensitive area that would be a big no no, but your general 300mm fab environment sees a lot worse day to day from technicians tear gloves and what not as they work to keep the machines running.
    Reply
  • wr3zzz
    I honestly thought the photo says Inte"laundry".
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    bit_user said:
    Years ago, I recall Zuckerberg being given a fab tour. It sticks in my memory because, at one point, he did something dumb like remove his face mask in the clean room, and that ruined like a whole batch of wafers.

    He did indeed. Several tools had to be wiped down to get them operational again. Obama just strolled in wearing his normal street clothes.

    The worst, however, I can remember is about 20 years ago. One of the vendor field service engineers ended up getting his hand stuck in a 1st gen copper electroplate machine. The robot had pinched his hand and held it in place about half an inch above a bath of fairly high-concentrate sulfuric acid. The other guy working on the machine with him was fairly new, and the only thing he knew to do was what was taught to him in training - hit the big, red EMO button. The EMO basically powers the machine completely down in event of an emergency.

    So now this poor guy has his hand smashed by a wafer handling robot so close to an acid bath that if he rests his fingers they're going into a vat of boiling acid. And the machine is now unable to be powered up to manually move the robot with the teach pendent. He's stuck.

    The fire department was called in. They ran into the cleanroom in just their normal firefighting gear and used a sawz-all to chop the robot arm in half and release the FSE. It took almost 2 weeks to decontaminate the facility after that one.

    Mr. FSE was largely unharmed and returned to work within a couple weeks.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    jkflipflop98 said:
    So now this poor guy has his hand smashed by a wafer handling robot so close to an acid bath that if he rests his fingers they're going into a vat of boiling acid. And the machine is now unable to be powered up to manually move the robot with the teach pendent. He's stuck.

    ...

    Mr. FSE was largely unharmed and returned to work within a couple weeks.
    Thanks for the amazing anecdote, but I wonder how his hand wasn't utterly cooked by having it stuck what sounds like just a couple cm above "boiling acid" for like an hour.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    L0rdrobot said:
    Tom's Hardware complains that posts are political ...
    The forum policies are separate from the site's editorial policies. For further details, see:
    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/toms-hardware-official-community-rules.3653950/
    L0rdrobot said:
    Fab is labour intensive
    See:
    https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-puts-1nm-process-10a-on-the-roadmap-for-2027-aiming-for-fully-ai-automated-factories-with-cobots
    L0rdrobot said:
    Building Fab overcapacity is ludicrous
    According to Sam Altman, it won't be nearly enough!
    https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openai-ceo-sam-altman-seeks-dollar5-to-dollar7-trillion-to-build-a-network-of-fabs-for-ai-chips
    You raise some valid points about the long-term prospects for US-designed semiconductors (regardless of where they're made, IMO). I think those points have nothing to do with trade sanctions on China. They were on a path to become technologically independent and competitive vs. US semiconductors, either way. The trade sanctions were a speed bump, in some respects, and an accelerant in others. Ignoring the problem, for so long, hasn't helped...

    BTW, I think you're misreading their progress on "narrow gates". The 5 nm multi-patterning node was already "baked in the cake", by the time the sanctions went into effect. What they sanctions should do is stop them from achieving yet smaller nodes or single-pattern 5 nm.
    Reply
  • parkerthon
    I don't see China as having a upper hand here, at all. They aren't screwed, but they have a long long road yet to go. Whatever they claim to have accomplished in this arena usually comes with huge asterisks. The fact that they are quietly and actively negotiating with the US as we speak despite their anger about our policies speaks volumes.

    Most of what is happening here isn't about building an industry but about creating some redundancy in chip fabs so they're not all on an island China insists they could legally take control of at any time(along with the entire sea south of it). The ROI of our CHIPS act will be poor, but I don't think we can measure it from a pure capitalist perspective. We need to position ourselves in a way that prioritizes chip production as one of many critical industries we need to be able to do within our western sphere or we have a huge achilles heel sitting right in China's backyard. Furthermore, establishing this independence, whatever the cost, gives us more leverage over China to hopefully normalize security relations again that keeps them from destabilizing the region on a whim.

    Biden doesn't say that because Americans only care about economics. So he is touting the thing that will likely be the least impactful to support the true mission that is geopolitical strategy driven.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    parkerthon said:
    The ROI of our CHIPS act will be poor,
    TL;DR: it's an insurance policy. You buy it to mitigate against the worst-case outcome.
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    bit_user said:
    Thanks for the amazing anecdote, but I wonder how his hand wasn't utterly cooked by having it stuck what sounds like just a couple cm above "boiling acid" for like an hour.
    Thankfully, he was wearing some pretty thick rubber PPE gloves. Quite an attention to detail ya got there :)
    Reply