The Cuts Continue; Up to 20% Of Intel Foundry Workers To Be Laid Off

July Will Be A Bad Month For Intel Foundry

Intel continues to implement rightsizing, or whatever euphemism is currently being used for layoffs, with somewhere between 15-20% of Intel Foundry employees facing unemployment in July.  It’s hard to say exactly how many people that is, Intel had 109,000 employees at the end of 2024, but we don’t know how many of them are employed in Intel Foundry.  It will certainly be a large amount, with drastic impacts on the livelihood of every employee that is terminated, and will bring Intel’s operating costs down.

The question is if the damage to Intel’s productivity will outweigh their lowered operating costs.  Intel already cut 15,000 jobs last year and just under 1000 in 2023.  This is a rather disturbing trend for the industry as a whole, not just for ex-Intel employees.  Their year over year earnings are not hemorrhaging as badly as they were in 2022 and 2023, declines of 20.21% and 14% respectively, 2024 saw a 2.08% decline and so far this year the decline has increased to 3.97%.  For a company that used to have yearly profits larger than the competitions total revenue this is a discomfiting trend.

Intel recently announced AI products and projects that they hope will allow them to compete with NVIDIA, but these cuts leave one wondering who is going to be left at Intel to spearhead those plans.  The delays in breaking ground on new fabs is also worrying to computer enthusiasts as well as investors.  2025 looks like it could herald a huge change in the semiconductor industry.