Intel is cutting 3,100 jobs at its largest U.S. hub in Oregon just as billions of dollars in CHIPS Act subsidies are being steered toward a new mega-site in Ohio, a shift that captures how Washington’s industrial policy is reshaping where advanced manufacturing happens. The layoffs underscore the tension between using public money to seed future capacity and protecting the communities that powered the company’s rise in the first place.
As Intel retools its business and chases federal support for cutting edge fabs, the company is asking long time workers in Hillsboro and the broader Portland region to absorb deep cuts while it builds out a new flagship campus near Columbus. I see that tradeoff as a test of whether the CHIPS program can deliver national resilience without hollowing out the legacy hubs that already anchor the semiconductor workforce.
Intel’s Oregon retrenchment hits a mature but still critical hub
Intel’s decision to eliminate 3,100 positions in Oregon marks a sharp retrenchment at a site that has long been the company’s biggest concentration of jobs and research talent in the United States. The cuts target a mix of manufacturing, engineering, and support roles tied to existing process technologies, reflecting Intel’s effort to streamline older operations while it pivots to new foundry customers and more advanced nodes. According to company disclosures and local reporting, the reductions are spread across the Hillsboro area campuses that form the core of Intel’s Oregon presence, which has historically employed tens of thousands of workers and anchored the state’s tech economy, a scale that makes the current layoffs particularly jarring for the region’s labor market and tax base (Oregon job cuts).
From an industry perspective, I read the Oregon cuts as Intel conceding that it cannot carry the same overhead in mature hubs while simultaneously funding an aggressive expansion of leading edge fabs elsewhere. The company has already signaled that it is trimming global headcount and capital spending to align with slower PC demand and the heavy upfront costs of its turnaround plan, and the Oregon layoffs fit that pattern of concentrating resources on the sites most closely tied to future revenue. Local officials have warned that the 3,100 job losses will ripple through suppliers, contractors, and small businesses that depend on Intel’s payroll, amplifying the impact beyond the direct employees who receive notices (regional impact).
CHIPS Act billions are reshaping Intel’s geographic priorities
While Oregon absorbs cuts, Intel is securing large federal subsidies to build new capacity in other states, most prominently in Ohio, under the CHIPS and Science Act. The company has positioned its planned campus outside Columbus as a centerpiece of the Biden administration’s effort to restore domestic semiconductor manufacturing, and the site has been highlighted in federal announcements detailing tens of billions of dollars in grants, loans, and tax incentives for chipmakers. Intel has described the Ohio project as a “silicon heartland” investment that will eventually include multiple fabs producing advanced logic chips, a scale that aligns with the CHIPS program’s goal of creating new clusters of high wage manufacturing jobs in regions that have not historically hosted major semiconductor plants (Ohio CHIPS support)…