Lots More on the Ongoing Mess That Is Intel - podcast episode cover

Lots More on the Ongoing Mess That Is Intel

Oct 04, 202431 min
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Episode description

The US is in the midst of a big effort to bring more semiconductor manufacturing onshore. Intel is the biggest US semiconductor manufacturer. There's just one problem. Intel has really been struggling to get its fab operations up and running in a timely, efficient manner. So what's the problem, and can the company turn things around? On this episode of Lots More, we speak to Stacy Rasgon of Bernstein Research and Mackenzie Hawkins of Bloomberg News to discuss the current struggles and future prospects for the company.

Mentioned in this episode:
Intel Gets Multibillion-Dollar Apollo Offer as Qualcomm Circles
Arm Is Rebuffed by Intel After Inquiring About Buying Product Unit

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    Transcript

    Speaker 1

    Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

    Speaker 2

    I am worried about Intel, No, for real.

    Speaker 1

    We're recording this on October first, So I'm worried about some other things. But sure, sure, no.

    Speaker 2

    There's plenty to worry about in the world. But like, I'm worried about.

    Speaker 3

    Intel specifically, because it's all nice to talk about industrial policy and we're going to build these you know, build out all these industries, et cetera. But here we have one of the true industrial giants, one of the flagship companies of the United States getting a lot of support, are leading company in the field of semiconductors, which is a major strategic priority for the US, and they do not seem to be doing.

    Speaker 4

    Well at all.

    Speaker 2

    The stock is absolutely dismal. They're cutting jobs.

    Speaker 3

    If this is the flagship company like them and Boeing loomed very large in my head about I guess what I would say is like, I don't know if corporate rot is too strong of a word, but yeah, like corporate rot.

    Speaker 1

    Not to add to your anxiety, but did you also see some of the headlines coming out of North Carolina about quartz sand.

    Speaker 2

    Yeah, I don't know what that's all about.

    Speaker 1

    It's kind of an interesting one. So after Hurricane Helene, there's a town called Spruce Pine where apparently most of the world's supply of pure quartz sand comes from, and that could have an impact on the production of semiconductors. So we get to I guess we get to unveil the bullhorn for the bullwhip effect. Again.

    Speaker 2

    We're not doing this. Apparently we are doing this again. I did a deadlift.

    Speaker 1

    One two, Jimmy okay, uh barges.

    Speaker 3

    This isn't after school Special, except.

    Speaker 1

    I've decided I'm going to base my entire personality going forward on campaigning for a strategic pork reserve in the US.

    Speaker 2

    Where's the best costa?

    Speaker 1

    These are the important question? Is it robots taking over the world?

    Speaker 3

    No, I think that like in a couple of years, the AI will do a really good job of making the odd Launch podcast And people say, I don't really need to listen to Joe and Tracy anymore.

    Speaker 2

    We do have touching, the perfect welcome to lots More where we catch up with friends about what's going on right now.

    Speaker 1

    Because even when Odd Lots is over, there's always lots more And.

    Speaker 2

    We really do have the perfect guest stacy, what's going wrong until.

    Speaker 4

    What's not going wrong? At Intel? Right now?

    Speaker 5

    They're in a tough spot, right, I mean they are embarking on a very risky and capital intensive strategy. I say embarking, but frankly they've been along on the strategy for quite a few years.

    Speaker 3

    Yeah, because CEO Pat Gelsinger came in in twenty twenty one, and so we're like at least three years into what is supposedly an embarkment on a new strategy. And if I just look at the stock price, it's lower than was in twenty fifteen.

    Speaker 5

    Yeah, in fact, you know it's I actually look, I launched on the stock in June of two thousand and nine. I think it was fifteen dollars and ninety four cents, so fifteen or sixteen years ago, and it's.

    Speaker 4

    Not that far off of there. Now.

    Speaker 5

    It's had a bit of a balance in the recent weeks. We can talk about why, but in general they're in a tough spot. Yeah, I mean the biggest issue that they're having, and we can argue, is the.

    Speaker 4

    Strategy the right one or the wrong one. That's a discussion we.

    Speaker 5

    Can have, but it might be the biggest issue is just the core business that was supposed to support them as they rolled that strategy out is no longer really sufficient to support it anymore.

    Speaker 4

    But they maybe too far along their path to stop. Right.

    Speaker 5

    The whole idea was, you know, we're gonna be doubling down on manufacturing.

    Speaker 4

    We're going to building lots of factories in the US and everywhere else.

    Speaker 5

    We're going to be building up a significant third party foundry business to make parts not just for ourselves but for other third party customers as well. We're getting a lot of external funding to do this, and you know, eventually we'll get there and it's going to be great. But that the problem is that the you know, these things are very you know, intensive, like they cost a lot of money, and because of the deterioration that we've seen in Intel's core business for a variety of reasons,

    the macro's not been great. You know, they were over earning as many were during COVID and and that bubble is popped. They're still losing share in many of their key markets. They've completely missed the AI revolution, which is one of the few areas of semiconductors today that's actually really on fire. And they effectively have nothing to show in that as and and those markets are starting to eat into some of the core stuff that Intel does.

    That core business doesn't doesn't really support that the path that they're on anymore, even after the subsidies and and frankly doing some other things that are probably not you wouldn't want to do if you didn't have to. They've been selling parts of some of their factories to private equity and getting cash for that. But even after all of that, you know, it's still costing them like a

    bunch of money that they don't really have anymore. They put out some targets recently that sort of showed a path to you know, a better companies, but in twenty thirty, it's twenty twenty four.

    Speaker 4

    Right now, that's a long ways away.

    Speaker 5

    There's a lot of wood to chop between now and then, even if they can manage to execute on that.

    Speaker 4

    So they're in a tough spot.

    Speaker 1

    So we are speaking with Stacey Raskin, who is of course the semiconductor analyst over at Bernstein. We've spoken to him before. We also have McKenzie Hawkins, who is our colleague here at Bloomberg. McKenzie, how existential are the next Oh, I guess, let's see October, November, December, next three months. For Intel.

    Speaker 6

    This is a crucial stretch for Intel, in part because it's a crucial stretch for the Biden administration. The company is the single largest beneficiary of this massive US effort to resource semiconductor manufacturing through Call twenty twenty two Chips in Science Act. They're in line to receive eight and a half billion dollars in grants for projects across four

    US states for commercial partners. They're also supposed to get three billion dollars to make chips for the Pentagon and eleven billion dollars in loans, not to mention twenty five percent tax breaks on their US investments. There isn't really a fear that the broader SEPSTY program will go away after President Biden leaves office. But Intel's been negotiating this award package with officials in the Biden administration for well

    over a year now. It's not yet finalized, and they really want to prove two officials that yes, we need to sign these documents. We want to get money out the door, ideally by the end of this administration, because who really knows what will come after January, and they're all trying to do that before they really really prove in the technology stack on which these awards are premised.

    Speaker 3

    Stacy two questions in your when you think of Intel, how important is the aid from the US government to its future? And when you think of the US government, how important is Intel to the policy objectives of the United States.

    Speaker 5

    They're clearly both important. The aid from the government is helping them. And by the way, I will say, I don't think they're in a critical situation from a cash standpoint right now, partially because of some.

    Speaker 4

    Of those government funds.

    Speaker 5

    So if you add up what they've just done, some of the were structuring that they've just announced, the CAPEX cuts, the op X cuts, the suspended dividend, they suspended their dividend right, the governmental funds both from the tax credit as well as the grants of those rolling as well as some of those private equity funds. It's something like forty billion dollars of incremental cash that lends on the balance sheet like through the end of twenty five of

    twenty twenty five, versus not doing anything at all. So like again, I think their cash position is okay because of this stuff. I don't think they're desperate. It's partially be due to those government funds. I will say, however, to get those grants, it's not like they don't get an eight and a half billion dollar check like they're milestone base. They have to do the projects and build them out and hit the milestones and then that money

    get gets apportioned. But that money is important in terms of like how important is Intel for the for the government's efforts. I mean, it's clearly very important. Although I will say, you know, if if the goal is really to get a ton of leading edge manufacturing capacity built in the US, you could argue if the government was only goal oriented, maybe picking Intel as their champion was

    not the best way to go. There are other players that you could have encouraged, who whether they're all building here, but you could have encouraged, for example, somebody like a TSMC to build a lot more here than they're doing.

    Speaker 4

    Now that being set, we're not just goal already.

    Speaker 5

    Other like politics is a huge piece. It's not politically viable to do something like that. Intel is the only US based company that can even hope to build out a leading edge footprint, and so I understand why they've been named the national champion, but I mean, it's just given the issues that they're having, it does sort of throw the eventual success of the program, especially especially around the leading edge side, into a little bit of a loop, like we'll have to see how things go for them.

    Speaker 6

    And you think it's important to remember here. Intel is the largest beneficiary of the Chips Act, but definitely not the only one. The US is in line to give more than six billion dollars to TSMC, the unambiguous industry leader. There's also more than six billion dollars lated for Samsung, which is building leading edge capacity in Texas. But Intel is really important one because the Pentagon has decided that we need an American company to make cutting edge chips

    for military and intelligence purposes. They've had early conversations about buying those chips from foreign owned foundries that are on US soil. It's crucial that we're having TSMC building three fabs in Arizona, and that was a commitment that the US government got from them with the carot of these subsidies. But Intel, I mean, Gelsinger kind of hinged his entire turnaround plan on this US manufacturing expansion was a major lobbyist pushing for the Ships Act, riding the coattails of

    that subsidy program. And yes, you know this says really high political stakes for the Biden administration and for industrial policy writ large. You know, I think it's a feature, not a bug of the program that Intel hasn't gotten any money yet. As Stacy mentioned, these are milestone based awards. You know, companies will get a tranch of money and they have you know, first wafers out of their facilities. Look at a trants of money when facilities are completed.

    But for a company that is, you know, not acutely running out of cash, but not in a great financial position like Intel, it really matters when that money actually flows. And the US government is still vetting the viability of these manufacturing plans in the first place before they're willing to sign a final agreement. All they've announced is a preliminary award.

    Speaker 1

    Is there a viable alternative to Intel? I get the sense that maybe there isn't.

    Speaker 5

    I mean, there are three companies in theory that can do leading edge semiconductor manufacturing global It's TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. And of those three, only really TSMC is hitting out of the park in terms of executing to their roadmaps. Like Intel, cole is having problems and again we can talk about their roadmap and where that may be going, but they've been having issues and Samsung as well as also having issues, Like this stuff is not easy, Like yeah, I.

    Speaker 3

    Always Samsung by the way, by the way, by the way, on the day we're recording this October first, Bloomberg reporting some substantial layoffs at Samsung and they're losing some shared to competitors like Skhnix, et cetera in certain lines. So yeah, just to talk about it's not just Intel having the struggles. Okay, keep going, Yeah.

    Speaker 5

    Yeah, so it's the stuff is hard to do. Again, I'm always amazed that any of it works at all.

    Speaker 4

    But to McKenzie's probably one of the three.

    Speaker 1

    I mean, the administration has said they want an American company to do this, and so I guess I'm wondering, like, are there ways that they could structure something with TSMC or Samsung or does it have to be an American company, in which case it seems like Intel is the only option.

    Speaker 5

    Yeah, if if you want an American company to do this stuff, they are the only option. It may be helpful to talk about their roadmap. So Patt has talked a lot about what he calls five nodes in four years, and according to Intel, they're executing, although if you kind of look at it, it's kind of kind of questionable. I mean, they're delivering what they're calling seven animeter today in volume. That's the old what they used to call ten.

    They are now starting to ship Intel four animeter. It's a single product that's called Meteor Lake, and in fact is it's a client PC product. It has a tiled architecture. There was one tile on there that's on Intel four and the other three tiles are made it actually outsourced.

    Speaker 4

    They made it TSMC, and.

    Speaker 5

    The margins of that product are not very good and it's actually it impacted their margins in the most recent quarter. They're getting ready to now to ship another client product which is called Lunar Lake, which actually from some of the ben shorts looks like a decent product, but it's one hundred percent outsource. There's no Intel technology and process technology and it all it's all made at TSMC, and they've talked about that further impacting their margins as we

    go into next year. The big one and I think the one that Pat is kind of betting the company on it is what's called eighteen A.

    Speaker 4

    So there were two flavors. There was a twenty eight.

    Speaker 5

    Process that was supposed to come out with a product called arrow Lake that they have canceled. So the five nodes in four years of the canceled they're going to jump straight.

    Speaker 4

    To eighteen A.

    Speaker 5

    Their characterization of that is an eighteen A is so good they don't need twenty get twenty eight, So I guess we'll have to see eighteen A in theory is when they start bringing volume back from the foundries back into their own fabs, which in theory is supposed to make their cost structure better. And if you think about the dream case that they laid out, the idea was, we do this, we bring all this stuff back. It makes our margins better because the cost are better because

    we're now internal. It's a better process, so we can take back market share and we can charge more for our product because we can design better products. And it gives customers like lots of confidence that things are going good, so they're confident to put a lot of volume with us, and we grow from there. And they talked about hitting the manufacturing business kind of hitting break even around twenty twenty seven and then growing to like very sizeable amounts by twenty thirty, so that.

    Speaker 4

    That's the dream. It's all riding on the success of eighteen A.

    Speaker 5

    Many of the sort of you know, kind of like supply change ets and channels that can pick up for eight and right, they're kind of mixed at best, I would say. On the positive, they just announced Amazon as a customer, and I guess Amazon was willing to have their name attached to it, so I guess that's good.

    Speaker 4

    It doesn't look like it's a high volume part.

    Speaker 5

    I think it's going to take time for this to ramp and I guess we're just waiting around and seeing and that's probably about how long they have. You know, in theory, eighteen A is supposed to be here next year. They've got a low volume server part called Clearwater Force that launches in the first half of next year. Panther Lake, which is a higher volume client product, launches in the second half of next year.

    Speaker 4

    I guess it'll be volume, real volume in twenty twenty six.

    Speaker 5

    So you got about a year a year and a half to see whether or not they can actually manage to make stuff in a cost effective manner for themselves on eighteen A and then we'll see if that drives volume or not. But that's about how long they have I think twelve months, maybe twelve to eighteen months, and then we'll see if this works or not. But at this point we don't know.

    Speaker 6

    And you know, Intel's ability to secure major customer commitments is of course a really key metric for US government officials that are trying to evaluate the viability of there should we be giving them eight and a half billion dollars of tax payer money for commercial manufacturing. I mean, they already have three billion dollars set aside for the Pentagon as a customer. But if you talk to anybody in the chip industry, the Defense Department is a really

    difficult customer. Foundaries that have been in a secure Pentagon supply chain in the past of struggle to make a return on products manufactured. Those fabs and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, in many ways, her legacy and her image and her the kind of main purpose of her department is riding a lot of the success of this program, and therefore, in part on the success of Intel not in a whole She's been calling up chip makers and saying, would

    you consider using Intel fabs? She asked in Vidia, she asked AMD to consider manufacturing at Intel's ohio facilities, and you know, in Vidias in the earliest stages of evaluating whether that's a possibility. AMD is happy with their current supplier, which is TSMC. And so you know, as much as the government really wants intels to succeed, the industry wants intels to succeed, even TSMC does. Intel's a four to

    five billion dollar customer of TSMC's. The custom comments just aren't there right now, and.

    Speaker 5

    There can't really you can't anything infirment. So you know, if they can deliver, yeah, right, So I think anyone that wants leading edge is going to evaluate them, like why wouldn't you, Like you want second sources, you want geographically secure supply. But I mean, if they can't deliver, they can't deliver. If they can deliver, they can And that's what we're waiting for. Throwing whatever money you want to throw at it, it isn't going to solve that problem.

    Speaker 3

    This gets back to like some of our first ever episodes that we did on semiconductors years ago. We're just about this basic challenge that like it's brutal to get hot yields. That there's all these processes and if you get it, if you get every process at ninety nine point nine to nine percent, right, that still doesn't get

    you the yields that you need to get. And so their strategy is like, Okay, you're building for this product, you're building for this end consumer, you're building, you're doing in house, and then there's execution and the big question mark is just this execution question and we just still don't know.

    Speaker 5

    Yeah, we don't know this. This again, even under the best of circumstances is very difficult. You know, they're going through a lot of other turmoil right now. So they have clearly in the midst of a big layoff. Yeah, they're actually like canceling some of these projects. So remember they weren't just trying to build in the US. They had a big Germany project with other subsidies that they just paused. They had a packaging plant in Poland. I

    think they just paused. So they don't need the capacity, right and they don't have the money.

    Speaker 4

    To pay for it. Even with the subsidies.

    Speaker 5

    So there's a lot of like other like internal turmoil that is going on there right now while they are still trying to execute on everything else that they have to do.

    Speaker 4

    Like it doesn't make it easier.

    Speaker 6

    You know, this is an intensely cyclical industry, right and you know, when we think about what does you know, Intel's success or failures say about the design of US industrial policy, you have to remember the ship sacked. Biden signed the ship sacked two years ago. That was sort of at the earliest stages of the AI boom, and were there were maybe warning signs about Intel, certainly, but not kind of the flashing red light that we see now.

    And so government officials not known necessarily for being super nimble or having to evaluate that in real time. We had a lot of preliminary announcements earlier this year. We saw basically a multi billion dollar announcement a week in March and April, and markets change, company dynamics change. And I think the challenge is that, you know, there's a sort of lack of understanding even among folks who pay attention to this sometimes in Washington, about whether the money

    has actually gone out the door. It hasn't but the public is expecting that. Intel is expecting that. I mean, the state of Ohio is investing two billion dollars in Intel's Ohio facility. Those plans are contingent on getting money from the US government, but officials also have to evaluate, you know, if a company, you know, Intel or anybody else, isn't able to execute on the timeline that we set out, at the scale that we set out, at what point do we start talking about other options of where to

    spend this money. Thirty nine billion dollars set aside for grants, that's a lot of taxpayer dollars.

    Speaker 1

    I just remember, the first time we ever had Stacy on was back in twenty twenty, which is kind of a blur for me. But Stacy, you were bearish on Intel even back then. In fact, I think like the title of the episode was something like, why the US's number one like semiconductor company is doing terribly something like that. I'm curious, in twenty twenty four, is there anything that would that you could possibly see that would induce you

    to be bullish on Intel? Like what would they need to do to prove their business case?

    Speaker 4

    Yeah?

    Speaker 5

    I mean, look, so they gave some targets. But like I said, which we're twenty thirty, my biggest takeaway from that was from those presidents was come.

    Speaker 4

    Back in twenty thirty. Right, call me twenty thirty.

    Speaker 5

    But if you sort of if I sort of started to articulate some of that dream thesis earlier, but if you think about it, you know it was, like I said, they execute on the new road maps, they take market share, you know, they build out their foundry business.

    Speaker 4

    And if you look at the targets, and again I'm going to refrain from.

    Speaker 5

    Giving like investment conclusions on this podcast, but just factually, what they presented for their twenty thirty model had them doing roughly one hundred billion dollars in total revenues, roughly sixty billion on their product groups, forty billion on their foundry manufacturing side. Of that forty billion, twenty five billion was internal revenues.

    Speaker 4

    What they're actually doing now, by the way, is they.

    Speaker 5

    Are charging their internal groups effectively a price to use the manufacturing base. So the internal does have to buy the wafers from the internal manufacturing when they're using and the net revenue nets out at the end. But you had forty billion in foundry twenty five billion internal and fifteen billion external, So it'd be if you nit up the twenty five billion, it would be seventy five billion in total revenues. The company's doing a little over fifty

    right now, maybe fifty billion. That fifteen billion in external foundry revenue would be double what Samsung does in foundry revenues today.

    Speaker 4

    So it's pretty big.

    Speaker 5

    But if you start to run numbers and then they give some margin targets, you start to run numbers like that, it looks like a good it's good. Like they're they're generating cash, they're making profits, right, and that would be you know, that would be a scenario where where things could be great, right. I think on the other side of it, you know, I get a lot of calls these days unlike the breakup value, Like what would it be would it call?

    Speaker 1

    Yeah, the qualcot, Yeah the QUI.

    Speaker 4

    Let's talk about that because that was in the news recently.

    Speaker 5

    There was a newsflow that suggested Qualcom may be interested in buying them, and we run the numbers on it, as I want to do, and look, I can argue for Qualcom potentially, you know, there's there's a diversification strategy Qualcom's revenues are if I have the licensing and it's eighty percent handsets, and there's a diversification story there for Qualcom,

    but it is slow going. And you know, Intel, if I just look at the product side of it, you know, look, if you just slap them together, you'd have a company that was I don't know, a third handsets, a third client, maybe fifteen percent data center. You'd have some auto in there. It would look more diverse and have more and more drivers. Right. Issues, I can't make it work if the fabs go along with it, oh right, And that's the problem because it's big.

    If you stock or qualk them, it would be massively deluded. And you start adding even a little bit of cash, the leverage gets to tow untenable levels. And so now to get back to the breakup, these says, this is my biggest issue with it. Intel is clearly prepping to split the company between products and manufacturing at some point. They've separated out the financials and they've even put it

    in an independent subsidiary. The issues right now, the foundry cannot stand on its own if if they were to devestigate, goes bankrupt immediately, it's losing twelve billion dollars a year and it's got one customer, right Intel. So that's not viable until they build a third party business, and that still becomes questionable.

    Speaker 4

    Can they build that or not.

    Speaker 5

    I don't think they can just sell the factory, say to TSMC or somebody like. I don't think TSMC wants

    to run them. Right again, they're losing a bunch of money, and TSMC's process flow is completely different, I think hypothetically, and this gets to the regula, you could just you scrap them, right, you sell the tools for whatever there were, but maybe that covers your restructuring and you go a whole to outsource stand So this is what AMD did, like effectively back from twenty eight to like twenty fourteen.

    Speaker 4

    That was sort of where they ended up.

    Speaker 5

    My issue with that is, at least right now, I don't think that's politically vital.

    Speaker 4

    Yeah, I've just given all the conversations we've been having, and so that's the thing.

    Speaker 5

    I don't know those fabs unless they can build the mountain, actually build those businesses they're in income. This is one could if you were but that it's maybe there's you know, maybe there's value to break up. But I think you have to destroy the company down locked. I don't think we're ready to do that right now.

    Speaker 6

    And to the point about political viability, that raises a really important question of you know, it is the Commerce Department and Secretary of Gena Raimondo's priority to get these fabs up and running in the US. The minute that we start talking about in acquisition, that gets kicked over to anti trust folks. And we don't know that Lena con that's see will have the same priorities as Gino Raimondo.

    It's a really really interesting test. And you know, right now there's obviously been a lot of news about Qualcom. We also saw ARM make an approach for Intel's design business and until said no. But ARM wasn't even interested in the manufacturing operation. And it's hard to see you know, anybody who's been working on the Chips Act interested in any type of acquisition that wouldn't see Intel move forward

    with its US factories. But who wants to take on one hundred billion dollars worth of manufacturing investments on American soil that don't seem likely to turn a profit.

    Speaker 3

    This is the problem. The main thing we want in this country is not advanced chips. We want the ability for American companies to be able to produce advanced chips, and there's no way to just sort of financially engineer your way out of investments that aren't delivering on that. Like we can talk about all kinds of combinations, we can talk about all kinds of whatever, but they're right, like.

    Speaker 1

    This is the core problem that money can't see.

    Speaker 2

    Yeah, that's exactly right.

    Speaker 5

    What you would need is somebody to go in and capitalize these ascid This is kind of what AMD did back back in two thousand and eight. You know, they sold their factories to the Middle East, Tabu Dhabi, to the bottle of them, but they were bleeding, right, this is.

    Speaker 4

    Actually what formed global founderies. Say Global Founderies actually.

    Speaker 5

    Only profitable day because they gave up on the leading edge and AMD actually like ditched them and they went whole hogged at TSMC back in the days. But that was the path they had, like a deep pocketed investor who apparently didn't really care about making decisions that were necessarily economically motivated.

    Speaker 4

    I mean clearly right now.

    Speaker 5

    It's like you were just to see something like with Intel, you need something that like investor levels would be one or two orders of magnitude higher than what we saw back then with AMD and their fabs, you know, ten, fIF fifteen, or twenty years ago.

    Speaker 4

    And I don't know, like where would that come from.

    Speaker 5

    Like I've had people suggest, oh, the government could do it, but I mean, the government's already funding them, like they don't have any other.

    Speaker 4

    Like dollars that are allocated.

    Speaker 5

    And I've had people suggest, oh, Intel's customers could do that, but if in those customers were interested in supporting, they could put foundry volume there. They don't need to like buy out the manufacturing and support the manufacturing assets, like I don't.

    Speaker 4

    This is what I meant when I talked earlier.

    Speaker 5

    I said, I, you know, they're the business as it stands doesn't necessarily support the path along the strategy, but they may be too late and maybe too late for them to stop what they're doing.

    Speaker 4

    This is kind of what I meant, So I kind of stuck.

    Speaker 1

    So I know, we've been focused on the problems at Intel, but I joked earlier that we might have to get the bullwhip bullhorn back out because of what's been happening in North Carolina how seriously should we take those headlines?

    Speaker 4

    Yeah, I mean so.

    Speaker 5

    For those of you that don't know, spruce primee is one of the largest global sources something called high purity quartz. High puriody quartz is used to make the crucibles that hold the silicon melt that are used to make silicon wafers for semiconductor manufacturing. The way you make silicon wafers by the ways, you have a big cauldron effectively of

    melted silicon. You dope it with all with specific amounts of impurities to get the properties you want, and then you touch a little piece of single crystal silicon to this molten silicon and you start to pull it up, and you rotate the crucible as you're doing this, and you pull out this effectively a big inget. It's called a bull of silicon. Who think can be I don't know, twelve or fifteen feet high at the end of it.

    Speaker 1

    That sounds so satisfying.

    Speaker 5

    Actually, it's called the Sharalski process or the CZ it's really really cool, and you can control the diameter of this bull via the pull speed and the rotational speed of this cauldron. And then they slice this thing up and they make silicon wafers out of it. So the high purity court to the ultri purity courts from Spruce Pine and a few other places used to make the quartz crucibles that holds the milk, and it is one

    of the largest sources. And the area just got pounded, I mean be inundated by Hurricane Helene.

    Speaker 3

    So the method is named after Polish scientist Jon Scheralski.

    Speaker 2

    God, there really are a lot of.

    Speaker 3

    Steps in semiconductor manufacture. The crucible.

    Speaker 5

    Yeah, this is just to make the wafers by the process been around for over one hundred years.

    Speaker 4

    Like it's a pretty remarkable Anyways.

    Speaker 3

    Mckennessee lawyer here, we're about to wrap any questions as a journalist, anything you need to ask Stacy.

    Speaker 6

    Oh gosh, I mean the big question is doesn't even fail? What do they have to do to not fail? And when we think about, you know, large, what does this policy need to look like to not justic scene and tell about to saying the ecosystem overall? Stacey, if you had to design a ship sacked too, what would it look like?

    Speaker 5

    Oh? Yeah, I mean first just done, Intel, Like I'm not gonna knock them. I think their biggest mistakes were not necessarily the strategy.

    Speaker 4

    And we can argue with strategy yes or no.

    Speaker 5

    But their biggest mistake I think was coming in and I mean when look when Pack got there, he kind of sounded more like a cheerleader than the CEO. I mean it was the AMD's in a review mirror, and he had these ludicrous targets that they were hiring to. I mean, he should have come in and said, look, I'm so happy to be back get intell, but like you're gonna have to be patient.

    Speaker 4

    It's going to be a slug.

    Speaker 1

    Wait till twenty thirty.

    Speaker 5

    I have to fix yeah, And it was always it took ten years to break it.

    Speaker 4

    Why would it take less than ten years to fix that? It was always going to take the twenty thirty.

    Speaker 1

    En I'm tempted to put this in my performance review. Wait till twenty thirty and see.

    Speaker 4

    That's talked lately.

    Speaker 5

    He wished that he took like harder actions on costs and everything earlier.

    Speaker 4

    Clearly they should have done that right.

    Speaker 5

    Instead, he went on a hiring spreel, you know, like headcount was up twenty one thousand employees in the seven quarters after he took the job, and then they had to lay off. Then they started hiring again. Now they're doing a bigger laugh. It's demoralizing. So those are clearly mistakes above and beyond. Again, we can talk about the strategy or not, but I certainly would have recommended they take.

    Speaker 4

    A harder line right right when they got there.

    Speaker 5

    In terms of the Chip to Act itself, I'm not going to say it's not successful. So the dollar amounts aren't actually that. They're thirty nine billion dollars for manufacturing. Plus you know, the tax got to probably be as big or bigger, you know, over like five years for the whole industry. Is actually not that big, but it

    is stimulating a lot of other incremental investment. And like the majority of the actual dollars that eventually will get spent or not coming from the Chips Actor, It's coming from the companies themselves, I mean, as it should so as a mechanism to stimulate like domestic investment in SEMIS, I think it is a success. Could we use more sure, although you have to even talk about its cyclical industry.

    You have to think about what's the right time in place to spend these dollars and in terms of like betting on Intel, what was a national champion. I mean that may or may not have been a good idea, but again, I don't know what choice they had just given the political realities of what they're doing. It's again I won't knock them, and it's a good first step. I just helped the wear with the political warrelhol is

    there to continue again. We've got an administration change coming up, and who the heck knows what's going to happen.

    Speaker 4

    I don't know, but I hope they can continue with this.

    Speaker 3

    Lots More is produced by Carmen Rodriguez and dash El Bennett, with help from Moses Onam and kil Brooks.

    Speaker 1

    Our sound engineer is Blake Maples. Sage Bauman is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts.

    Speaker 3

    Please rate, review, and subscribe to Odd, Lots and Lots More on your favorite podcast platforms.

    Speaker 1

    And remember that Bloomberg subscribers can listen to all our podcasts at free by connecting through Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening. I just realized it's Stacy, Tracy and McKenzie. Oh you're the odd one out show. Joey

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