Intel abandons chip plants in Germany and Poland, confirms more layoffs

What is going on here?

I'm just an interested layman, but i'll give explaining it a try. I think this is more about whether or not Intel can stay in the market for leading edge manufacturing against TSMC.

The first thing to understand is that there are two parts to Intel: the manufacturing side and chip design.

In manufacturing leading edge chips they are primarily competing with TSMC (the clear market leader) and Samsung. In the past they used to be far ahead of the competition, but they screwed up that lead and are now behind. This is a very capital intensive market as fabs cost billions to build. And each new generation gets more and more expensive.

On the design side there are multiple different markets: servers, desktop/laptops, and mobile devices. Ever since losing out on producing the chip for the first iphone intel hasn't been a factor in the mobile market. Between servers and desktop/laptops, servers are the fastly more important and bigger market. Here they are competing with AMD, but also increasingly arm based processors, increasingly done by the large hyper scalers themselves (e.g. Amazon with their Graviton processors). Additionally with the ai boom the market has severely shifted towards gpus being vastly more important (which is dominated by nvidia).

Intel is relatively unique in that they still do both design and produce their own chips (not taking outside customers, but in recent times outsourcing some manufacturing to tsmc). Samsung also designs and produces their own arm based processors (exynos), but on a smaller scale and also has other customers. AMD used to have fabs in the past, but got rid of them (today called global foundries).

I would argue that here we need to primarily focus on the manufacturing, not design side. Even though they are also under pressure on the design side aswell and e.g. AMD is beating them in the server market.

It's more about whether or not Intel can hold on being in the leading edge race as manufacturer or drop out (like GlobalFoundries did a while back), which would leave us with only TSMC and Samsung (potentially China's SMIC, should they ever manage to develop their own EUV technology and catch up). No western manufacturer of leading edge chips, only asian ones that are heavily concentrated geographically and TSMC bearing a substantial geopolitical risk.

As mentioned above Intel has struggled with getting better process nodes working properly (especially in a timely manner) and costs are increasing by a lot. The issue is that now intel is severly cash strapped, as they've paid out massive dividends in the past when things were better and now that they've fallen behind earnings have disappeared (which is also why the mass layoffs).

Their competitor TSMC can spread the needed investment costs over many large customers such as apple, nvidia, amd and qualcomm. So far Intel manufactured purely for themselves and didn't take on external customers. With massively increasing costs it becomes obvious how this becomes less feasible on your own and scale increasingly becomes important. Especially if either/both the design or manufacturing side mess up and fall behind on delivering competitive products.

Switching to manufacturing for external customers is difficult. They have to adjust their internal processes to suit what customers are used to from others. There is a potential conflict of interest as Intel might at the same time be the customers rival (an issue TSMC as pure manufacturer doesn't have). And lastly customers need reliable schedules, if you are e.g. apple and release an iphone anually you need your manufactuerer to reliably deliver a workable node at a specific time and can't have it delayed (or even have the uncertainty of this happening).

They originally planned for their upcoming 18A (maybe even the axed 20A?) process to have external customers, but that didn't pan out (they will just produce some of their own products). Now they target external customers for the next generation 14A. Should they by then not have gotten their shit together enough to attract customers or be profitable Intel (the former giant of the semiconductor industry) will probably break apart and be done. At least in it's current form.

The fabs in germany and poland have been dead in the water for a while now from the moment they fell behind schedule and eventually were put on hold. This is just them officially axing those plans.

This would absolutely kill home computing for the next decades. Talk about worst case scenarios.