Intel's building a new €17B cutting-edge chipmaking fab in Germany

Intel has announced it will be building a brand new, leading-edge foundry in Magdeburg, Germany. The new facility will cost €17 billion to construct, but Intel hopes it will massively improve its ability to deliver on its next-gen process nodes (Angstrom-era) in Europe and abroad.

It's long been assumed that Intel would pick Germany for its new European fab, but now we know exactly what Intel has in mind. Intel's building in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany, in a city called Magdeburg. Intel's dubbed it the "Silicon Junction", because you've got to have a nickname like that.

Beyond that, Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger has outlined further European investment, and was even joined by president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to discuss the massive EU project with Intel.

Further investment to existing fabs in Ireland is planned, as is a new R&D design hub in France. Intel is also planning to expand its Poland lab space in Gdansk by 50%, and continuing work with a Barcelona-based supercomputer centre.

Of course, in terms of this investments impact on PC gaming, it will be some while before that fab is up-and-running and ready to spit out the sorts of gaming processors we want in our machines. But it is a good sign of things to come, and of an Intel that's re-energised to get the somewhat tarnished global supply today back to a good level in the future.

Construction for the new chipmaking facility is expected to begin in 2023, with production coming online in 2027.

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Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog from his hometown in Wales in 2017. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things at PCGamesN, where he would later win command of the kit cupboard as hardware editor. Nowadays, as senior hardware editor at PC Gamer, he spends his days reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industry. When he's not writing about GPUs and CPUs, you'll find him trying to get as far away from the modern world as possible by wild camping.