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Intel’s Rio Rancho campus has run out of fab space. “All of the fab space that we have is full or is in the process of being full,” said Katie Prouty, Intel’s New Mexico plant manager and site leader, at SEA’s partner breakfast on October 22. Intel advanced packaging in New Mexico is the company’s only high-volume operation of its kind in the United States. More growth means new room.
Intel’s presenters described the options a little differently. One said the campus has space for an adjacent factory of similar size, provided electricity and water can be worked out with the community. Another saw less room. The site has a little on its south side, but nothing like the land at Intel’s Arizona and Oregon sites.
The next packaging plant is more likely overseas. Intel has a shell building in Malaysia that Prouty said “would probably be next.”
Intel had choices in 2021, too. New Mexico fit the company’s needs for advanced packaging when it weighed where to invest. Local leaders helped. The state, the county and the legislature all took steps to ease that decision, and without them the work could have gone overseas or to another state.
For decades Intel built one processor, and customers added everything else on a board. Advanced packaging puts memory, processors and graphics into a single package. A customer that wants more graphics power, or more memory, can ask for exactly that.
Intel’s EMIB method embeds small bridges in the base layer to link the pieces. Foveros stacks them, a method Intel detailed when it opened Fab 9 in 2024. The newer EMIB-T adds connections through the back of the package for more power and speed. Intel developed those connections in New Mexico and now produces them here.
Fab 11X also does something no other Intel site does: silicon photonics, which moves data with light instead of electrical signals. It matters for the growing demand for AI computing.
Most of the chips still go to one customer. Intel has opened its factories to outside companies, a business called a foundry. Even so, Prouty said, “Intel’s main customer is Intel. Like there’s no question about that.”
Customers say they like US-made chips. They do not like paying extra for them. “Nobody wants to pay more for it,” Prouty told the group.
That is why the plant is automated from end to end. Fab 9, which sat vacant for years before the retrofit, now ties directly into Fab 11X. Equipment is a second pressure point. Lead times that once averaged about six months now run nine months to a year for some tools.
The site began in 1980 with 25 employees, according to Intel’s timeline slide. Today it has about 2,700 permanent employees and roughly 500 permanent contractors. Counting suppliers, an estimated 4,000 to 4,500 people badge in on a typical day. Intel puts capital invested in New Mexico since 1980 at about $17.7 billion.
About 60 percent of the workforce is technicians and 40 percent engineers. For technician roles, Intel cares less about degrees than hands-on skill. It asks applicants whether they work on bikes or cars, because mechanical aptitude is what it can train.
Intel also keeps people longer when it hires in state, and it works with CNM, UNM, New Mexico Tech and New Mexico State. SEA covered that pipeline in its look at the tech workforce in Sandoval County. Employers weighing training costs can read how the Job Training Incentive Program works in Rio Rancho. They can also run their own numbers in SEA’s Business Incentive Estimator.
