Lies, Damn Lies, and Semi-Fabs on Stolen Lands

Rob, Gord, you've sure shit the bed this time..

(The short-sighted idiots in question)

I really wasn’t expecting to write this one, but I noticed that a wide open lane has appeared and I’m gearing to take it.

As many of you already know, tensions in West Asia (the ‘Middle East’) have flared up yet again, continuing in recent hours to unfold with the deaths of more than 650 and thousands injured across Israel, and the toll likely to skyrocket as the days go on + with additional deaths reported by participating collectives.

This is, according to historians, the most significant violence the so-called nation has seen in more than 50 years, and is a stark reminder that things can change for the worse in an instant. As it stands this evening, the event so far is ugly and painful, and is only likely to worsen as the theater is set for genuine war - protracted and hideous as it would appear.

So what the fuck do Intel’s beloved founders Rob Noyce and Gordon Moore have to do with any of this? Surely they weren’t stupid enough to invest in Israeli settlements or anything back in the 1970s, right? Intel is a good innocent American corporation after all, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with fabs in Ohio, Oregon and Arizona. They can’t possibly ha..

Fabs 28/28A & 38 @ Kiryat Gat

(You know they did. // Photo of Intel Kiryat Gat via Arik Choshen)

Waaaaaay back in the days of actual computing (C.1985), Intel proudly opened their first semiconductor fabrication facility in Israel, ‘Fab 8’, in the Holy city of Jerusalem. This was a happy arrangement for them for a decade through the mid-1990s, when they had hoped to expand the facility but were ultimately blocked by ultra-orthodox community members, whom objected to the facility operating on Saturdays.

This lead to their 1996 groundbreaking of a new facility in a town near Tel Aviv named Kiryat Gat, and again, things worked out well for them and on the surface continue to.

Following that opening, peoples around the world have benefitted from the fruits of the Zionist’s labor in their personal computing, boosting the prestige and bottom line of an American corporation in the process. Win/win - Intel got much-needed extra capacity in a relatively seismically-calm place during a boom time with plenty of cheap labor, plus willing politicians subsidizing the whole deal along the way. Israel got untold economic activity and further interconnectedness with Western Globalist life. It was, and still largely is, a match made in consumerist hell. Heaven. Sorry. Heaven. Phew.

Unfortunately for Team Blue, that all appears to be coming to a rapid close, seemingly to its surprise, in which it appears to have very little in the way of contingency should anything happen to their facilities in Kiryat Gat (or Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv, where they also have facilities active though not fabs). This is not a position CEO Pat Gelsinger or an INTC investor wants to find themselves, and this is becoming a potential reality with intense gunfighting reported this evening in a town roughly an hour’s drive from Kiryat Gat, called Kiryat Arba.

NOTE: I don’t want to posit that any of Intel’s facilities are in active danger, nor have they been deemed targets or targeted in any actions by any belligerents. THIS HOWEVER IS TO SAY that it all could change in an instant, and with that level of instability I genuinely believe it’s beyond time Intel re-thinks the whole damn scenario, lest they watch hundreds of billions of dollars go up in smoke one October evening.

Why did Intel initially choose Israel? It isn’t clear why the original executives threw a dart at a map freshly re-labeled ‘Israel’, beyond the already mentioned lack of seismic activity, seemingly high levels of national security, and potential US government encouragement to do so. That is largely besides the point however, and does not help them today. Gordon is dead, he can’t save them now, Hamas is firing rockets and it doesn’t matter why his team picked this locale. Their mistake.

So… Where exactly does that leave Intel in Israel, aside from ‘fucked, looking for shipping containers, and flights to San Jose’? I have to assume someone(s) in their corporate risk team are already having hushed meetings about this very topic, looking to offload the equipment, labor and process tech to countries where Intel is either attempting to start production (Germany, Poland), or bolster their existing presence (America, Vietnam, Ireland), preferably NATO countries with American military bases in them. Does this mean Intel might possibly leave Israel? Perhaps, but I doubt they will entirely, though you may see some reductions in output from some facilities as it shifts elsewhere.

Conversely; Haifa, a small town on the northern coast of the landmass, is home to another Intel office - and if you have an Intel CPU with Efficiency cores, you’re using their efforts. This team designed the ‘Gracemont’ architecture more or less entirely themselves, and it is to my mind one of the greatest Israeli accomplishments in bettering humanity. To say that this office and team is crucial to the Intel corporate structure is an understatement, given how much they have helped develop from the original Core series through today. This office is also, I must add, within very close striking distance of Lebanon and Syria - a distance of a few hundred miles south on the coast from Beirut, and an hour and a half’s flight southwest from Damascus.

Will Intel close this office? Probably not. Are the occupants under considerable risk from hostile nations, given their proximity? I would say so. What can Intel do about this? Ehh… Do Lebanon and Syria even care? Probably not. I doubt it’s even crossed their minds. Should Intel be worried anyways? DUH.

(A map of the region, showing Haifa’s proximity to Syria and Lebanon)

Illegal Settlements Inside

Now of course this is all very interesting: maps and history, political death cults, violation of international law, old bad blood, computer witchcraft.. sure, but one has to ask - did at any point anyone at Intel ask if the geopolitical instability stemming from a brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing was a positive backdrop amongst which to nestle a progressive, forward-thinking company? Was it wise to select land that, historically, had been held by various religious tribes for the better part of 2,000 years prior to the 1948 arrangements? At any time, did anyone bother to ask “Hey, is this location safe in the long-term?”

During the 1980s and 90s, nobody reconsidered this plan or maybe had a backup just in case - why bother if it’s working fine. In the 2000s, during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when America was riding high, I can more understand not giving it a second thought. It is however now clear that American unipolarity and hegemony is waning on all fronts, and only diminishing more rapidly with time. We, Americans, as a moral force for good, lost our credibility with the aforementioned War on Terror and have never gained it back - deservedly so. We then tripped blindly through Libya, turning it into an open air slave market; then haphazardly attempted to occupy a large swath of Syria in the hopes of ousting Al Assad, to no avail over 10 years.

To say this all accumulated the strain of point beauty is to miss the point entirely. Our most recent folly, Ukraine, is currently being chucked under the bus like unwanted trash, slowly to be memory-holed alongside every other geopolitical mistake we’ve made. Israel is likely to be the straw to break Uncle Sam’s back, and I just don’t see good things coming from this conflict, especially not for Intel. My only question is, can Pat Gelsinger figure this out before it’s too late? Or is it already past the point of no return for Fab 38?

Time will tell. In the meantime, don’t forget to pick up some new Intel powered Dell laptops for your loved ones. The Israeli war economy surely depends on it, and the supply chain might be disrupted by war very soon.