Intel invests US $500 million to increase CPU demand of 14nm process

Although 14nm is coming to an end, there are a large number of customers catching up with the "last bus", resulting in a shortage of CPU supplies.

At the beginning of the year, Intel announced an additional capital expenditure of $1 billion to shift to newer and more advanced production tools to increase production capacity. At the 39th Nasdaq investor conference this week, Murthy Renduchintala, chief engineering officer, president of technology, systems architecture and customer group, revealed that Intel actually added $1.5 billion in additional investment this year.

In other words, Intel's actual capital expenditure (i.e., production equipment, construction of new facilities and the like) reached $15.5 billion in 2018.

Since Intel said it was an extra 1 billion in September, it means that Intel will spend another $500m in a few months, which shows how serious Intel is facing "supply falling short of demand", that is, customer orders far exceed expectations.

Since Intel rarely discloses information about its production capacity, it is not ready to trace how much its 14nm manufacturing capacity has increased this year and what targets it has set for the first and second quarters of 2019.

At the same time, it should be noted that $1.5 billion is mainly used to shift to newer and more advanced production tools to enable them to increase the production of existing plants. Many of these tools will be reused to produce chips using more advanced process technologies, so Intel will make full use of them in the next few years.