Washington, July 26: Intel will slash around 24,000 employees this year – roughly a quarter of its workforce – while scrapping major expansion projects in Germany and Poland as CEO Lip-Bu Tan implements sweeping cost-cutting measures to revive the struggling chipmaker’s fortunes.The semiconductor giant, which employed 99,500 core workers at the end of 2024, plans to finish 2025 with just 75,000 employees following what Tan described as “hard but necessary decisions” in his memo to staff Thursday. The cuts include layoffs already completed in the second quarter, where Intel eliminated about half of its management layers while booking $1.9 billion in restructuring costs.
“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote to employees, marking his most aggressive restructuring move since taking the helm in March. “We will build what our customers need, when they need it, and earn their trust through consistent execution.”
The company reported a $2.9 billion quarterly loss on $12.9 billion in revenue, extending Intel’s longest losing streak in 35 years to six consecutive quarters. Despite beating Wall Street revenue expectations, Intel’s struggles highlight how far the once-dominant PC chip manufacturer has fallen behind rivals like Nvidia and AMD in the AI boom.
Intel is abandoning plans for a multibillion-dollar “mega-fab” in Germany that would have employed 3,000 workers, along with an assembly and test facility in Poland designed for 2,000 employees. The company had already paused these projects by two years in 2024 before axing them entirely under Tan’s leadership.