Intel Corp. is investing in its Folsom campus, adding data center infrastructure and equipment, according to building permits filed with the city.
Santa Clara-based Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) had contractor Skanska USA Building Inc. pull permits for $10.5 million in work at the campus at 1900 Prairie City Road.
“The expansion supports expanding emulation capability within the data centers,” said Rita Holiday, California external affairs manager with Intel, via email.
The addition of emulation capability in Folsom is part of an expansion of facilities infrastructure on the campus to enable data center growth on the site, she said. She added that Intel would not release any more details about the work.
The expansion and investment in Folsom is a positive sign from the Folsom campus, where the only news coming out locally from the tight-lipped company in the past year was a series of layoff notices.
Intel Folsom had at least 784 layoffs through last year in a series of cuts that spanned from January to 235 cuts in December.
The scope of the new construction work in the existing building includes foundations and footings, underground plumbing and electric, other electric, underground work, structural shear walls and drywall along with other systems, according to the building permit.
That $10.5 million in construction work likely doesn’t include the cost of emulation equipment, which is used to test prototype chips for verification and bugs before they are manufactured.
Some emulators on the market can test chips through tens of billions of gates. Gates are logic-based binary functions, the building blocks of computing.
Emulators can be software or hardware. They re-create computing environments either virtually or connected to hardware so engineers can test processor chips after they've been designed but before they are mass produced. The company wouldn't say whether it already had emulator equipment in Folsom.
Intel Folsom is an office, research and development and support site, but it is not one of the company’s chip manufacturing factories. The Folsom Intel campus includes 1.5 million square feet of office, test floor and lab space.
As recently as 2018, Intel Folsom had more than 6,000 employees. At the end of 2023, it had 4,300 employees tied to the Folsom campus.
Some of that reduction was Intel spinning out about 800 employees at the end of 2021 as part of the sale of its flash memory business to South Korean memory chip maker SK Hynix Inc. The spinoff was used to form a new company, Solidigm, based in Rancho Cordova.
Intel is the leader of a cluster of chip R&D in and around Folsom. Micron Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) has had engineering and R&D operations in Folsom since it acquired Numonyx, a company spun out of Intel, in 2010. And in the past year South Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. and San Diego-based chipmaker Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM) have opened offices in Folsom.
Their locations here could help those companies to work with Intel in Folsom, and some of those openings were to take advantage of the chip engineering talent pool in Folsom.
Intel began cutting jobs companywide early in 2023 after it watched revenue decline 20% from $79 billion in 2021 to $63.1 billion at the end of 2022.
The company reported a first-quarter loss in 2023 of $2.77 billion on lower chip revenue. It was the largest loss ever for a quarterly period for the chip giant, and it compared to a profit of $8.11 billion in the first quarter of 2022. The revenue drop was attributed to an industrywide slowdown in chip sales related to slowing personal computer sales.
In the first quarter this year, Intel lost $400 million. It saw revenue of $12.7 billion in the first quarter, up 9% from the previous year.
