Intel is poised to announce plans this week to cut more than 20 per cent of its staff, aiming to eliminate bureaucracy at the struggling chipmaker, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
It is understood that the IDA, Ireland’s foreign direct investment agency, is engaging with the firm on foot of this morning’s reports.
However, sources said neither the Government nor the agency had been given details of any plans as of yet.
In a statement on Wednesday, Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke said that Ireland continues to play an important role as the company’s European hub for manufacturing semiconductors, “and we don’t see speculation around headcount reduction changing this”.
Mr Burke said he is engaging with Intel, along with IDA Ireland, ahead of the company’s financial results being announced on Thursday evening. He pointed to the strong relationship between Intel and Ireland, most recently shown by the opening of the Fab 34 facility in 2023, with a price tag of €17 billion.
“We continue to partner with Intel in areas of research and innovation and our upcoming National Semiconductor Strategy launch will further enhance this important sector,” he said.
The Intel move is part of a bid to streamline management and rebuild an engineering-driven culture, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. It would be the first major restructuring under new chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, who took the helm last month.
The cutbacks follow an effort last year to slash about 15,000 jobs – a round of lay-offs announced in August. Intel had 108,900 employees at the end of 2024, down from 124,800 the previous year.
A representative for Intel declined to comment.
The company’s Irish operation is its biggest outside the US and is seen as “critical” to reversing the slide in the once-dominant chipmaker’s fortunes, according to sources close to the company.
Minister for Higher Education James Lawless, who is a TD for Kildare North, said that the operation at Leixlip is “very engineering focused and coupled with chip design”, which may protect the site from any cutbacks focused on other areas of the business.
Mr Lawless said that the media reports suggested the firm would be looking at a “pivot” back to engineering.
“That would suggest he is looking to trim bureaucracy, but the operation in Leixlip is all about engineering,” he said. “If you’re looking for places that may be a bit bloated in terms of secondary support services, that’s not Leixlip.
“I would be confident the plant and operation in Leixlip sits in a good place in the context of this report,” he said.
Sources said earlier this year that cutbacks in Ireland had, in the main, been implemented in the third quarter of last year. Intel is one of the State’s biggest employers, employing 4,900 staff mainly at its Leixlip plant, which includes its new Fab 34 chipmaking facility.
Mr Tan is aiming to turn around the iconic chipmaker after years of Intel ceding ground to rivals. The company lost its technological edge and has struggled to catch up with rival Nvidia in artificial intelligence computing. That contributed to three straight years of sales declines and mounting red ink.
Mr Tan, a veteran of Cadence Design Systems, has vowed to spin off Intel assets that aren’t central to its mission and create more compelling products. Last week, the company agreed to sell a 51 per cent stake in its programmable chips unit Altera to Silver Lake Management, a step toward that goal.
Intel needs to replace the engineering talent it has lost, improve its balance sheet and better attune manufacturing processes to the needs of potential customers, Mr Tan said last month at the Intel Vision conference.
Patrick Guilbaud on bringing fine dining to Ireland, retirement plans, and not getting that third Michelin star
The company is scheduled to report first-quarter results on Thursday, giving Mr Tan an opportunity to lay out more of his strategy. Though the worst of Intel’s revenue declines are now behind it, according to Wall Street estimates, analysts aren’t projecting a return to its previous sales levels for years, if ever.
The 65-year-old executive was hired after last year’s ouster of CEO Pat Gelsinger, who struggled to execute his own turnaround bid for Intel. He had embarked on a costly effort to expand the company’s factory network – and sought to turn Intel into a made-to-order chip manufacturer.
But Intel has now delayed much of its expansion effort, including plans for an Ohio facility that was once expected to become the world’s largest chip production hub. Intel also had been poised to be the biggest beneficiary of money from the 2022 Chips and Science Act, but that programme is now in flux under president Donald Trump.
A manufacturing partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co – the source of investor speculation in recent months – also seems less likely to happen. TSMC chief executive CC Wei said last week that the company would remain focused on its own business.
Along the way, Intel missed out on the most lucrative new field for the chip industry in decades. The company, which long dominated the market for personal computer and data centre processors, was slow to respond to the shift to artificial intelligence. That upheaval allowed Nvidia to grow from a niche player into the world’s most valuable semiconductor company – with revenue that now eclipses Intel’s sales.
Mr Gelsinger himself admitted that the company had lost its competitive spirit and expressed frustration with the speed at which it reacted to a changing market. He wasn’t given the time he’d said he would need to do something about that. Mr Tan, in his first public appearance as CEO last month, said the turnaround would take time and wouldn’t be easy.
“It won’t happen overnight,” he said. “But I know we can get there.” – Additional reporting, Bloomberg
