Gelsinger spoke about his prospect to CNBC and Bloomberg, with apparently less hope than before. In October of last year, Gelsinger was asked for a similar statement; at that time, the top executive expected the supply-demand ratio for chips “to stabilize in 2023”.
According to Gelsinger, the reason for the delayed stabilization would lie primarily in the factories themselves. Pc components are increasingly available these days, but in the’ fabs ‘ people are now struggling with shortages around all kinds of equipment.
Gelsinger: “that is why we believe that the overall semiconductor shortage is now running out until 2024, contrary to our early expectations for 2023. Because shortages are now shifting to [factory]equipment, it is becoming more difficult in some places to scale up production again.”
Intel itself would have taken the right precautions, Gelsinger claims. “The combination of internal capacity and our influence over [external] factories puts us in a better position. That’s a bit of a structural advantage that Intel has.”
Since the increasing shortages around semiconductors in 2020, Intel has revealed several grand plans to remedy such setbacks (in the future). In early 2021, it was announced that Intel is investing around $ 20 billion in the construction of a fab in Arizona; a year later, the chip giant announced an investment of 33 billion euros to improve the European semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem. This includes the expansion of Intel’s fab in Ireland, but also the construction of an entirely new factory in Germany.
Big plans for expansion or not; for the time being, Gelsinger sees the situation around the deficits as the least hopeful, compared to his colleagues and competitors. For example, AMD Chairman Dr. Lisa Su claimed last summer that deficits would decrease significantly during”the second half of 2022″. Since the end of last year, many large chip companies have kept their lips shut about (the persistence of) the global deficits.