Then, along comes Tuesday, announcing to upgrade its manufacturing in the U.S. -- a move that will retain or create about 7,000 jobs.
Intel is facing the same economic headwind , and its .
But there stood detailing investment plans for facilities in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico -- and not in China.
There are a lot of reasons why Intel may want quickly move to build manufacturing capability for , and also why the U.S remains the best place to make them, say analysts.
Frank Gillett, a vice president at Forrester Inc., said Intel's roadmap for producing the new processors was established long ago, and not moving ahead with this plan , exposing the company to competitive risks.
The new chips, codenamed Westmere, won't appear in servers until the end of this year or early next year, and by then, business spending on technology may be rebounding, said Gillett. "It would be hard to argue that they shouldn't be making this investment," he said.
Intel could have, theoretically, moved the manufacturing of the new chips overseas to a low-wage country. Manufacturing jobs have been flowing overseas: From 2001 to mid last year, the U.S. lost some 2.3 million manufacturing jobs, to 13.5 million, according to a .
Foreign nations are also offering Intel hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives. But the labor savings and financial incentives don't offset the capability that the company has here, says Otellini.
Analysts agree. "One of Intel's tremendous strengths is process control [in making chips]", said , a research vice president at The company has a high level of quality assurance that it can scale, she said. "This is a major technology skill" that would cost huge amounts of time and money to transfer, Fiering said.
Much of that skill level is a product of the talent coming from U.S. universities, a point made Tuesday by Otellini, who urged investment in education. Intel employs about 45,000 people in the U.S.
"Our standard of living doesn't allow us to compete for low wage jobs," said Otellini, who added that the biggest threat to the U.S. was an erosion of education.
Intel made Tuesday's announcement in Washington, which, as part of its stimulus, is also about to pump billions of dollars of , and a variety of programs likely to increase demand for information technology and products made by Intel.
Otellini pointed to many areas in the more than $800 billion in stimulus that he supports, while also calling for a "culture of investment."
It's an argument he appears to have backed up with his own $7 billion investment Tuesday.