The chip company confirmed upcoming layoffs but declined to give any more detail on who or where those job cuts might affect
Intel “won’t have a [finalised] headcount number” for its overall cuts until July, the tech firm has said on a conference call after its quarterly earnings.
However, Intel’s new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, said that layoffs are coming in its next financial quarter.
“There is no way around the fact that these critical changes will reduce the size of our workforce,” he wrote in an email to employees.
“As I said when I joined, we need to make some very hard decisions to put our company on a solid footing for the future. This will begin in Q2 and we will move as quickly as possible over the next several months.”
In a note posted after its quarterly earnings report on Thursday night, the company added that cuts would involve “streamlining the organisation, eliminating management layers”, with no further detail on the sectors to be targeted, other than that it intended to shrink expenses in “R&D, marketing, general and administrative” divisions.
Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Intel planned to cut its workforce by 20pc.
Almost all of Intel’s staff in Ireland are based at its Leixlip, Kildare manufacturing facility. Under Irish employment law, Intel is required to inform the government if it intends to make staff redundant here.
The struggling chip company remains one of Ireland’s largest employers and has been a mainstay of the country’s industrial setup since it set up its first plant there in 1989, investing more than €30bn in chip-making operations.
Lip-Bu Tan is seen as a costcutter by nature, having left the Intel board last year over a dispute with the then CEO, Pat Gelsinger, over the company having too many staff.
Intel had already announced significant layoffs last year, cutting numbers by around 15,000 to leave the company’s headcount at just over 100,000 worldwide.
In 2023, Intel opened the first part of a new €17bn Fab 34 plant, complete with high-end chip making equipment that can make the company’s new advanced AI chips, its brand new 1.8 nanometre ‘18A’ variant on which it is basing a chunk of its future survival.
In 2024, Intel sold 49pc of the aforementioned Fab 34 Leixlip facility to a private hedge fund, Apollo, for $11bn.
It recently announced a ‘foundry’ plan to make chips for other companies, like industry-leading TSMC does.
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