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Intel Corporation

How Elon Musk and Tesla Helped Make C.E.O Pay Even Richer

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While those compensation totals are taken from the company’s financial filings, they are often estimates driven by the companies’ attempts to value the stock their chief executives might receive. As a result, the executives may earn less than those totals, especially if the bear market persists and their companies’ stock prices remain depressed, but they could also take home far higher amounts should the stocks recover.

Many of the highest-ranking executives in the survey received pay packages that were far larger than those of the heads of far bigger companies with much larger profits. For example, Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, received his first equity award since 2011 last year and had total compensation of $99 million, putting him just 13th in the survey.

Despite the growth in pay, shareholders, apparently believing that it is being tied to performance, have voted in favor of most packages. Only 3 percent of “say on pay” votes got less than 50 percent support from shareholders in the year through June 3, according to an analysis of 1,444 public companies by Willis Towers Watson, a consulting firm that advises companies on executive pay programs and corporate governance matters.

For several years, public companies have had to compare their chief executive’s compensation with that of a typical employee, the result of a regulation passed by Congress that aimed to help investors assess the level of executive pay. Last year, chief executives earned 339 times more than the median pay of employees at their companies, up from 311 times in 2020, according to Equilar. The median employee wage rose 10 percent last year, to $92,349 from $83,808.

Last year’s executive pay jumped in part because corporate boards, which decide chief executive compensation, wanted to reward top officers for navigating their companies through the pandemic.

In addition, the stock market rallied in 2021, and the value of stock grants, which typically constitute the largest share of chief executive compensation, was also higher. When stock prices are rising, boards tend to say executives are doing a good job — and pay them more.

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How Intel Makes Semiconductors in a Global Shortage

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Some feature more than 50 billion tiny transistors that are 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. They are made on gigantic, ultraclean factory room floors that can be seven stories tall and run the length of four football fields.

Microchips are in many ways the lifeblood of the modern economy. They power computers, smartphones, cars, appliances and scores of other electronics. But the world’s demand for them has surged since the pandemic, which also caused supply-chain disruptions, resulting in a global shortage.

That, in turn, is fueling inflation and raising alarms that the United States is becoming too dependent on chips made abroad. The United States accounts for only about 12 percent of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity; more than 90 percent of the most advanced chips come from Taiwan.

Intel, a Silicon Valley titan that is seeking to restore its longtime lead in chip manufacturing technology, is making a $20 billion bet that it can help ease the chip shortfall. It is building two factories at its chip-making complex in Chandler, Ariz., that will take three years to complete, and recently announced plans for a potentially bigger expansion, with new sites in New Albany, Ohio, and Magdeburg, Germany.

Why does making millions of these tiny components mean building — and spending — so big? A look inside Intel production plants in Chandler and Hillsboro, Ore., provides some answers.

Chips, or integrated circuits, began to replace bulky individual transistors in the late 1950s. Many of those tiny components are produced on a piece of silicon and connected to work together. The resulting chips store data, amplify radio signals and perform other operations; Intel is famous for a variety called microprocessors, which perform most of the calculating functions of a computer.

Intel has managed to shrink transistors on its microprocessors to mind-bending sizes. But the rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company can make even tinier components, a key reason Apple chose it to make the chips for its latest iPhones.

Such wins by a company based in Taiwan, an island that China claims as its own, add to signs of a growing technology gap that could put advances in computing, consumer devices and military hardware at risk from both China’s ambitions and natural threats in Taiwan such as earthquakes and drought. And it has put a spotlight on Intel’s efforts to recapture the technology lead.

Chip makers are packing more and more transistors onto each piece of silicon, which is why technology does more each year. It’s also the reason that new chip factories cost billions and fewer companies can afford to build them.

In addition to paying for buildings and machinery, companies must spend heavily to develop the complex processing steps used to fabricate chips from plate-size silicon wafers — which is why the factories are called “fabs.”

Enormous machines project designs for chips across each wafer, and then deposit and etch away layers of materials to create their transistors and connect them. Up to 25 wafers at a time move among those systems in special pods on automated overhead tracks.

Processing a wafer takes thousands of steps and up to two months. TSMC has set the pace for output in recent years, operating “gigafabs,” sites with four or more production lines. Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of the market research firm TechInsights, estimates that each site can process more than 100,000 wafers a month. He puts the capacity of Intel’s two planned $10 billion facilities in Arizona at roughly 40,000 wafers a month each.

After processing, the wafer is sliced into individual chips. These are tested and wrapped in plastic packages to connect them to circuit boards or parts of a system.

That step has become a new battleground, because it’s more difficult to make transistors even smaller. Companies are now stacking multiple chips or laying them side by side in a package, connecting them to act as a single piece of silicon.

Where packaging a handful of chips together is now routine, Intel has developed one advanced product that uses new technology to bundle a remarkable 47 individual chips, including some made by TSMC and other companies as well those produced in Intel fabs.

Intel chips typically sell for hundreds to thousands of dollars each. Intel in March released its fastest microprocessor for desktop computers, for example, at a starting price of $739. A piece of dust invisible to the human eye can ruin one. So fabs have to be cleaner than a hospital operating room and need complex systems to filter air and regulate temperature and humidity.

Fabs must also be impervious to just about any vibration, which can cause costly equipment to malfunction. So fab clean rooms are built on enormous concrete slabs on special shock absorbers.

Also critical is the ability to move vast amounts of liquids and gases. The top level of Intel’s factories, which are about 70 feet tall, have giant fans to help circulate air to the clean room directly below. Below the clean room are thousands of pumps, transformers, power cabinets, utility pipes and chillers that connect to production machines.

Fabs are water-intensive operations. That’s because water is needed to clean wafers at many stages of the production process.

Intel’s two sites in Chandler collectively draw about 11 million gallons of water a day from the local utility. Intel’s future expansion will require considerably more, a seeming challenge for a drought-plagued state like Arizona, which has cut water allocations to farmers. But farming actually consumes much more water than a chip plant.

Intel says its Chandler sites, which rely on supplies from three rivers and a system of wells, reclaim about 82 percent of the freshwater they use through filtration systems, settling ponds and other equipment. That water is sent back to the city, which operates treatment facilities that Intel funded, and which redistributes it for irrigation and other nonpotable uses.

Intel hopes to help boost the water supply in Arizona and other states by 2030, by working with environmental groups and others on projects that save and restore water for local communities.

To build its future factories, Intel will need roughly 5,000 skilled construction workers for three years.

They have a lot to do. Excavating the foundations is expected to remove 890,000 cubic yards of dirt, carted away at a rate of one dump truck per minute, said Dan Doron, Intel’s construction chief.

The company expects to pour more than 445,000 cubic yards of concrete and use 100,000 tons of reinforcement steel for the foundations — more than in constructing the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Some cranes for the construction are so large that more than 100 trucks are needed to bring the pieces to assemble them, Mr. Doron said. The cranes will lift, among other things, 55-ton chillers for the new fabs.

Patrick Gelsinger, who became Intel’s chief executive a year ago, is lobbying Congress to provide grants for fab construction and tax credits for equipment investment. To manage Intel’s spending risk, he plans to emphasize construction of fab “shells” that can be outfitted with equipment to respond to market changes.

To address the chip shortage, Mr. Gelsinger will have to make good on his plan to produce chips designed by other companies. But a single company can do only so much; products like phones and cars require components from many suppliers, as well as older chips. And no country can stand alone in semiconductors, either. Though boosting domestic manufacturing can reduce supply risks somewhat, the chip industry will continue to rely on a complex global web of companies for raw materials, production equipment, design software, talent and specialized manufacturing.

Produced by Alana Celii

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Global Shortages During Coronavirus Reveal Failings of Just in Time Manufacturing

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In the story of how the modern world was constructed, Toyota stands out as the mastermind of a monumental advance in industrial efficiency. The Japanese automaker pioneered so-called Just In Time manufacturing, in which parts are delivered to factories right as they are required, minimizing the need to stockpile them.

Over the last half-century, this approach has captivated global business in industries far beyond autos. From fashion to food processing to pharmaceuticals, companies have embraced Just In Time to stay nimble, allowing them to adapt to changing market demands, while cutting costs.

But the tumultuous events of the past year have challenged the merits of paring inventories, while reinvigorating concerns that some industries have gone too far, leaving them vulnerable to disruption. As the pandemic has hampered factory operations and sown chaos in global shipping, many economies around the world have been bedeviled by shortages of a vast range of goods — from electronics to lumber to clothing.

In a time of extraordinary upheaval in the global economy, Just In Time is running late.

“It’s sort of like supply chain run amok,” said Willy C. Shih, an international trade expert at Harvard Business School. “In a race to get to the lowest cost, I have concentrated my risk. We are at the logical conclusion of all that.”

shortage of computer chips — vital car components produced mostly in Asia. Without enough chips on hand, auto factories from India to the United States to Brazil have been forced to halt assembly lines.

But the breadth and persistence of the shortages reveal the extent to which the Just In Time idea has come to dominate commercial life. This helps explain why Nike and other apparel brands struggle to stock retail outlets with their wares. It’s one of the reasons construction companies are having trouble purchasing paints and sealants. It was a principal contributor to the tragic shortages of personal protective equipment early in the pandemic, which left frontline medical workers without adequate gear.

a shortage of lumber that has stymied home building in the United States.

Suez Canal this year, closing the primary channel linking Europe and Asia.

“People adopted that kind of lean mentality, and then they applied it to supply chains with the assumption that they would have low-cost and reliable shipping,” said Mr. Shih, the Harvard Business School trade expert. “Then, you have some shocks to the system.”

presentation for the pharmaceutical industry. It promised savings of up to 50 percent on warehousing if clients embraced its “lean and mean” approach to supply chains.

Such claims have panned out. Still, one of the authors of that presentation, Knut Alicke, a McKinsey partner based in Germany, now says the corporate world exceeded prudence.

“We went way too far,” Mr. Alicke said in an interview. “The way that inventory is evaluated will change after the crisis.”

Many companies acted as if manufacturing and shipping were devoid of mishaps, Mr. Alicke added, while failing to account for trouble in their business plans.

“There’s no kind of disruption risk term in there,” he said.

Experts say that omission represents a logical response from management to the incentives at play. Investors reward companies that produce growth in their return on assets. Limiting goods in warehouses improves that ratio.

study. These savings helped finance another shareholder-enriching trend — the growth of share buybacks.

In the decade leading up to the pandemic, American companies spent more than $6 trillion to buy their own shares, roughly tripling their purchases, according to a study by the Bank for International Settlements. Companies in Japan, Britain, France, Canada and China increased their buybacks fourfold, though their purchases were a fraction of their American counterparts.

Repurchasing stock reduces the number of shares in circulation, lifting their value. But the benefits for investors and executives, whose pay packages include hefty allocations of stock, have come at the expense of whatever the company might have otherwise done with its money — investing to expand capacity, or stockpiling parts.

These costs became conspicuous during the first wave of the pandemic, when major economies including the United States discovered that they lacked capacity to quickly make ventilators.

“When you need a ventilator, you need a ventilator,” Mr. Sodhi said. “You can’t say, ‘Well, my stock price is high.’”

When the pandemic began, car manufacturers slashed orders for chips on the expectation that demand for cars would plunge. By the time they realized that demand was reviving, it was too late: Ramping up production of computer chips requires months.

stock analysts on April 28. The company said the shortages would probably derail half of its production through June.

The automaker least affected by the shortage is Toyota. From the inception of Just In Time, Toyota relied on suppliers clustered close to its base in Japan, making the company less susceptible to events far away.

In Conshohocken, Pa., Mr. Romano is literally waiting for his ship to come in.

He is vice president of sales at Van Horn, Metz & Company, which buys chemicals from suppliers around the world and sells them to factories that make paint, ink and other industrial products.

In normal times, the company is behind in filling perhaps 1 percent of its customers’ orders. On a recent morning, it could not complete a tenth of its orders because it was waiting for supplies to arrive.

The company could not secure enough of a specialized resin that it sells to manufacturers that make construction materials. The American supplier of the resin was itself lacking one element that it purchases from a petrochemical plant in China.

One of Mr. Romano’s regular customers, a paint manufacturer, was holding off on ordering chemicals because it could not locate enough of the metal cans it uses to ship its finished product.

“It all cascades,” Mr. Romano said. “It’s just a mess.”

No pandemic was required to reveal the risks of overreliance on Just In Time combined with global supply chains. Experts have warned about the consequences for decades.

In 1999, an earthquake shook Taiwan, shutting down computer chip manufacturing. The earthquake and tsunami that shattered Japan in 2011 shut down factories and impeded shipping, generating shortages of auto parts and computer chips. Floods in Thailand the same year decimated production of computer hard drives.

Each disaster prompted talk that companies needed to bolster their inventories and diversify their suppliers.

Each time, multinational companies carried on.

The same consultants who promoted the virtues of lean inventories now evangelize about supply chain resilience — the buzzword of the moment.

Simply expanding warehouses may not provide the fix, said Richard Lebovitz, president of LeanDNA, a supply chain consultant based in Austin, Texas. Product lines are increasingly customized.

“The ability to predict what inventory you should keep is harder and harder,” he said.

Ultimately, business is likely to further its embrace of lean for the simple reason that it has yielded profits.

“The real question is, ‘Are we going to stop chasing low cost as the sole criteria for business judgment?’” said Mr. Shih, from Harvard Business School. “I’m skeptical of that. Consumers won’t pay for resilience when they are not in crisis.”

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‘It’s a Roller-Coaster Ride’: Global Chip Shortage Is Making Industries Sweat

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Dan Rozycki, the president of a small engineering firm, worries about what a global semiconductor shortage could mean for curing concrete.

Mr. Rozycki’s company, Transtec Group in Austin, Texas, sells small sensors that are placed where concrete is poured at building, highway and bridge construction sites. The gadgets take temperature readings and wirelessly send data so workers with computers can ensure the material is hardening properly.

Like many other things in the modern world, from computers and cars to cash registers and kitchen appliances, the sensors require a couple of common, inexpensive semiconductors that have suddenly become a very scarce commodity.

“Every month our product is getting more popular,” Mr. Rozycki said. “But we may not be able to make it in several months.”

Shortages of semiconductors, fueled by pandemic interruptions and production issues at multibillion-dollar chip factories, have sent shock waves through the economy. Questions about chips are reverberating among both businesses and policymakers trying to navigate the world’s dependence on the small components.

Chip supply limitations are far from a new phenomenon. But past problems have typically concerned particular kinds of chips, like the types that help store computer memory or process vast amounts of data. This time, customers are also scrambling to find an array of simpler chips made in older factories. And those factories are difficult to upgrade.

ordered a 100-day review of the semiconductor supply chain, a process that drew chief executives of 19 big companies to a virtual meeting Monday. Congress has backed legislation aimed at spurring more domestic chip manufacturing to reduce dependence on Taiwan and South Korea, which Mr. Biden has proposed funding with $50 billion in his infrastructure plan.

Most attention has focused on temporary closings of big U.S. car plants. But the problem is affecting many other sectors, particularly the server systems and PCs used to deliver and consume internet services that became crucial during the pandemic.

Pat Gelsinger, the new chief executive of the chip maker Intel, who attended the meeting with the president on Monday. “People are begging us for more.”

The chip shortage potentially affects just about any company adding communications or computing features to products. Many examples were described in 90 comments filed to the Biden supply chain review by companies and trade groups, including a laundry list of needs from industry giants like Amazon and Boeing.

The personal computer giant HP said the shortage of semiconductors had prevented the company from being able to meet demand for computers ordered by schools. Rising chip prices also have made it harder to offer affordable hardware for less-wealthy school districts during the pandemic, the company said.

Mr. Rozycki’s engineering firm in Austin is for now among the lucky chip users. It planned ahead and has enough chips to keep making the roughly 50,000 sensors it supplies each year to construction sites. But his distributor has warned him it might not be able to deliver more of them until late 2022, he said.

“Is that going to halt those projects?” Mr. Rozycki asked. He is scouring the market for other distributors that might have the two needed chips in stock. Other possibilities include redesigning the sensors to use different chips.

drought in Taiwan and a cold snap in Texas that temporarily shut down factories operated by Samsung Electronics, NXP Semiconductors and Infineon.

“It’s hell on earth right now,” said Frank McKay, chief procurement officer at Jabil, which buys billions of dollars’ worth of chips each year to assemble products for customers that include Apple, Amazon, Cisco Systems and Tesla.

On any given day, he said, his company is facing shortages of 100 or so components and has to use all its negotiating power to get them — successfully so far. “But it’s a roller-coaster ride every day,” Mr. McKay said.

Fixing other issues is likely to stretch into 2022. Mr. Gelsinger said Intel was talking to auto industry suppliers about shifting some production of their chips to older Intel factories, possibly starting in six to nine months. But adding new production tools to an existing chip plant can take a year. Building a new one takes three years.

“This is going to be a long healing,” said Thomas Caulfield, chief executive of GlobalFoundries, a big U.S. chip manufacturer that is doubling capital spending this year so it can meet demand.

For now, chip delivery schedules have stretched from around 12 weeks to more than a year in some cases, chip buyers and brokers said. That is bad news for companies like the webcam start-up Wyze Labs.

“We’re going to be straight up with you about some bad news we got this week,” the company wrote in a note to customers in January. “Some of our key suppliers informed us they would only be able to supply about one-third of the chips we need to make Wyze Cams.”

The company, which is based in Kirkland, Wash., predicted problems stocking the third version of its flagship webcam. The company website says it is sold out, with more inventory expected in one to two weeks. Wyze did not respond to requests for additional comment.

Supply problems can be a touchy topic, said Zach Supalla, chief executive of Particle, a San Francisco company that buys chips to make communication and computing equipment. It sells its devices to thousands of companies that make products like hot tubs, air-conditioners and industrial and medical equipment.

Particle has so far has secured enough chips to keep making its products, he said. But the company is asking customers to order further and further in advance to ensure it can meet demand, Mr. Supalla said.

When chips can be found, price markups can be stark. One particularly unglamorous widget, a type of ceramic capacitor that ordinarily sells for around 3 cents each, became hard to find when a Covid-19 outbreak temporarily closed a factory in China.

The capacitor shortage hurt production of a popular cellular modem. That modem, which normally sells for $10 to $20, spiraled to $200 on the spot market, Mr. Supalla said. Customers like car companies may be willing to pay such sums to keep producing $40,000 cars, Mr. Supalla said. But not all can.

Some buyers suspect profiteering. Jens Gamperl, chief executive of an online components exchange called ngine, recounted a call from an executive who fumed that a chip normally priced at $1 each was listed for sale by the exchange at $32. Mr. Gamperl had to explain that his own company had been forced to pay $28 for the component.

“That is the kind of craziness that we see left and right now,” he said.

Besides the direct effect on hardware makers, chip shortages can reduce shipments and raise the cost of servers and networking equipment to offer services like streaming entertainment, remote learning and medicine. They can also affect software makers.

Tripp, a Los Angeles start-up that makes a kind of meditation app that exploits virtual-reality headsets from Sony and others, was banking on the new PlayStation 5 to lift software demand, said Nanea Reeves, Tripp’s chief executive. But chip shortages helped to hobble that console launch.

“We were expecting a bigger bump from the PS5,” she said. The company is hoping more consoles arrive in the second quarter.

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Amid a chip shortage, the White House gathers business leaders to discuss supplies.

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The White House convened a meeting of business executives on Monday to discuss semiconductor supply chains amid a global chip shortage, with President Biden using the moment to pitch his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, which aims in part to bolster high-tech domestic manufacturing.

“China and the rest of the world is not waiting, and there’s no reason why Americans should wait,” Mr. Biden said.

At one point, he held up a silicon wafer and declared, “This is infrastructure.”

Participants in the meeting, described by the White House as a “virtual C.E.O. summit on semiconductor and supply chain resilience,” included executives from AT&T, Ford Motor, General Motors, Google, Intel, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The meeting was closed to the news media, aside from a brief portion when Mr. Biden gave remarks.

The global semiconductor shortage has disrupted auto production in the United States and elsewhere, underscoring both a short-term and long-term challenge for the Biden administration with economic and national security implications.

signed an executive order directing his administration to conduct a 100-day review of supply chains for semiconductors and several other types of critical goods.

His infrastructure plan also seeks to strengthen supply chains for chips and other important products.

It includes $50 billion for semiconductor research and manufacturing, and another $50 billion to create an office at the Commerce Department focused on the country’s industrial capacity and support for the production of critical products. It also includes $50 billion for the National Science Foundation, where Mr. Biden would create a technology directorate focused on areas like semiconductors.

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Intel plans to spend $20 billion on two new chip factories in Arizona.

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Intel’s new chief executive is doubling down on chip manufacturing in the United States and Europe, a surprise bet that could please government officials worried about component shortages and dependence on factories in Asia.

Patrick Gelsinger, who took the top job in February, said on Tuesday that he planned to spend $20 billion on two new factories near existing facilities in Arizona. He also vowed that Intel would become a major manufacturer of chips for other companies, in addition to producing the processors that it has long designed and sold.

Intel had stumbled in developing new production processes that improve chip performance by packing more tiny transistors on each piece of silicon. The lead in that costly miniaturization race had shifted to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, and Samsung Electronics, whose so-called foundry services make chips for companies that include Apple, Amazon, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

Some investors and analysts had pushed for Intel to spin off or discontinue manufacturing in favor of external foundries, an approach taken by most other chip companies to increase profits.

a pandemic-fueled shortage of semiconductors for cars, appliances and other products has underscored the vital role of chip factories in supporting many sectors of the economy. And before the recent concerns, worries about the Asian foundries’ proximity to China had already prompted Congress and several branches of the Trump and Biden administrations to back plans to encourage more domestic chip manufacturing, though funding had not yet been appropriated.

Officials in Europe have also floated proposals for new factories to reduce reliance on foreign-made chips.

The Intel strategy recognizes “that the world no longer wants to be dependent on the ring of fire that is right there next to China,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, an industry analyst at VLSI Research. “It’s very forward-looking.”

TSMC previously announced plans for a new factory in Arizona, a project that it valued at $12 billion and that is expected to receive federal subsidies. Samsung is seeking government incentives for a $17 billion expansion of its facilities in Austin, Texas.

Mr. Gelsinger, who first joined Intel at 18, left in 2009 after 30 years. He served eight years as chief executive of the software maker VMware before Intel’s board persuaded him to replace Robert Swan, who was ousted in January.

Intel said its new global foundry service would operate from the United States and Europe, with further factory additions expected to be announced in the next year. It already runs plants in Ireland and Israel.

“The industry needs more geographically balanced manufacturing capacity,” Mr. Gelsinger said.

While it is committing $20 billion up front, Intel hopes to negotiate with the Biden administration and other governments to get incentives for its manufacturing expansion, said Donald Parker, an Intel vice president.

Though it makes most products in house, Intel has long used external foundries for some less advanced chips. Mr. Gelsinger said the company would expand that strategy to include some flagship microprocessors, the calculating engines used in most computers. That will include some chips for PCs and data centers in 2023, he said, and give Intel more flexibility in meeting customer needs.

But manufacturing will remain the core of Intel’s strategy, Mr. Gelsinger said, despite its recent technical problems.

He said significant improvements were being made in its next production process, which was delayed last summer. Intel also will engage with IBM in a new partnership to develop new chip-making technology, he added.

Mr. Gelsinger’s plans are bound to meet skepticism. Besides recent problems with manufacturing technology, Intel has tried in the past to operate as a foundry for other companies with little success.

But Intel has modified those plans in several ways. For one thing, it will for the first time be willing to license its technical crown jewels — the so-called x86 designs used in most of the world’s computers — so customers can incorporate that computing capability in chips they design for Intel to make, the company said.

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