You may have noticed that Intel has been in the news a lot lately, whether it's talking about its race to be on the cutting edge of chip manufacturing, getting billions of dollars from the US administration, or having a little trouble getting its high-end CPUs to run the latest games. But they are certainly very busy building all kinds of new facilities for processor manufacturing and expanding their labs, and in a brief report on their 10 major construction projects, Intel shares that the total cost of all their current investments will be over $160 billion by the time they are all finished The report states.

You might think that this is a lot of money to throw at something like this, but rest assured, TSMC is spending nearly $65 billion to build three chip manufacturing plants in Arizona. But Intel is also spending more than $36 billion to improve its R&D facility in Hillsboro.

To put this in perspective, Nvidia spent just under $9 billion on R&D in the last fiscal year, and while not much detail is given as to where that money is being spent, it is almost certain that the bulk of it is being used to design the next generation of AI superchips. chips, but Intel manufactures its own chips, at least in large part because about one-third of the wafers Intel needs are manufactured at TSMC.

The star of Intel's report is big numbers. For example, it has invested $32 billion to build two plants in Arizona and has so far poured 430,000 cubic yards (329,000 cubic meters) of concrete into the ground. This is the equivalent of 132 Olympic-sized swimming pools for those who prefer water-based measuring systems.

It is similarly massive in Ohio: over the past year, more than 4 million cubic yards of earth has been moved, 10 miles (16.1 km) of underground utilities and 32 miles (51.5 km) of conduit have been installed. [Two-thirds of the $160 billion investment is for construction and upgrades to facilities in the U.S., while more than $40 billion total is being spent on fabs in Ireland and Israel, $7 billion on a 3D packaging plant expansion and new assembly facility in Malaysia, and a new assembly and test system in Poland in Poland for $4.6 billion.

There is no escaping the fact that this is a tremendous amount of money and there is zero risk of it not paying off. The days of Intel's near total dominance of the processor market are long gone, as AMD is not the only company that must compete; in the AI world, Nvidia dominates the field, and Google and Amazon are also investing heavily in the continued development of chips for machine learning

Intel.

Intel has the largest market share when it comes to x86 processors, but with Qualcomm entering the space with its Snapdragon X Elite and AMD looking to gain a larger share with its next-generation architecture, Zen 5, the 55-year-old chip The giants clearly don't expect the next few years to go their way.

"You have to spend money to make money" or so the saying goes, and $160 billion is a lot of money, so investors will be hoping Intel's plans come to fruition.