Six months after projecting that the worldwide chip shortfall would persist until at least 2023, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger now thinks we’ll be out of the woods by 2024.
“We anticipate the entire semiconductor shortfall will now drift into 2024, from our original projections of 2023,” he told CNBC on Friday, “simply because the shortages have already affected equipment and some of those plant ramps will be more challenging.”
While this may sound doom-and-gloom, keep in mind that the “chip shortage” is a complex, changing scenario that does not affect every type of chip at the same time.
As time goes on, some sectors and parts have been struck more than others. Intel’s own CPUs, in fact, are doing admirably. “Intel fabs and our substrate supply are close to fulfilling our customers’ demand for the first time in years,” Gelsinger said during the company’s Q1 2022 earnings call yesterday.
When Gelsinger believes the scarcity will last until 2024, he’s referring to the industry’s capacity to meet demand for new items made on new lines rather than existing ones. “We expect the sector to have issues in areas like foundry capacity and tool availability as an IDM until at least 2024,” he said on the call yesterday. According to Digitimes, chipmaking equipment vendors are now backlogged for more than 18 months, up from six months just a year ago.
To put it another way, CPUs, GPUs, and game consoles were among the most high-profile commodities affected by shortages, but supply and demand appear to be balancing out.
However, networking chip vendors are still facing a substantial chip shortage: Gelsinger singled out ethernet as a particularly challenging “ecosystem supply restriction” that has hampered PC sales.
By the way, Intel is one of the firms investing extensively in new production lines, with new fabs being built in Ohio, Arizona, and Germany, however the present timetable indicates that none of the new fabs will be operational until the chip shortage is resolved. The first new fabs aren’t expected to debut until 2024 in Chandler, Arizona.
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