OHIO — The launch date of Intel’s $20 billion chip manufacturing project in Ohio has been pushed back due to a slow chip market and the slow rollout of U.S. government grant money, according to the company.
“We’re proud to be building in the Silicon Heartland,” said Elly Akopyan, a spokesperson for Intel. “We remain fully committed to the project and are continuing to make progress on the construction of the factory and supporting facilities this year. As we said in our January 2022 site-selection announcement, the scope and pace of Intel’s expansion in Ohio may depend on funding from the CHIPS Act and other business conditions.”
Dan Tierney from Governor Mike DeWine’s office told Spectrum News that a delay is not unusual for a project of this size and Nick Gill with the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC) said it gives Ohio more time to prepare for the influx of people expected to move to the state in the coming years.
“It’s always good to have as much time as possible to plan," said Nick Gill, the transportation study director at MORPC. “Having more time to actually get the projects from a planning stage to an implementation stage, finding those funds, finding those resources, is probably as much as anything is what a delay in opening year may mean for the area right around there.”
MORPC is expecting the Central Ohio region to exceed three million residents by 2050, which is about 700,000 more people than what the area has right now. Gill said the region was already growing before Intel announced the selection of Ohio for their newest chip manufacturing site in January 2022, but it adds to it.
Gill said the delay allows the state more time to finish road improvement and expansion projects happening in many counties, allows time to close the gap on the housing shortage, and time to further prepare the state’s workforce to be able to fill the jobs at Intel once they become available.
“What it will allow is them to be, if they [the projects] weren’t scheduled to be in place by the opening of the Intel site, now they might be in place by the time those workers get there,” Gill said.
Construction on Intel’s Ohio chip-manufacturing site has been underway since breaking ground in late 2022. Intel said they are making headway on the project, they just won’t meet the aggressive 2025 production goal that they anticipated.