Intel has made a milestone progress with its large-scale chip manufacturing plant being built in New Albany, Ohio, but the construction of this plant is at least five years behind schedule. Meanwhile, the demand for advanced chips is rising rapidly.

Intel announced on Wednesday that the construction team has installed the first main structural truss in Ohio, which means that the next phase of construction has finally begun.

Naga Chandrasekaran, the head of Intel's foundry business ( Naga Chandrasekaran ), wrote in a post published on the company's website on Wednesday: "This represents another important step towards expanding the United States' leading process semiconductor production capacity."

However, Intel still needs customers to help make this investment worthwhile.

In September, reports emerged that SK, a global leader in high-bandwidth memory manufacturing, Hynix, might collaborate with Intel in Ohio to lease some manufacturing space and produce memory chips at the new location. Neither company has confirmed any such plans.

When Intel initially announced this Ohio plant in 2022, it was expected to start chip deliveries in 2025. Since then, Intel has postponed this timeline, and the current goal is to complete construction by 2030. The campus, located northeast of Columbus, also plans to complete a second Ohio plant in 2031.

This delay reflects that under the leadership of CEO Chen Liwu ( Lip - Bu Tan ), Intel has made a more extensive readjustment to its foundry ambitions.

The Ohio plant is just a part of Intel's ambitious expansion plan. This plan began during the tenure of former CEO Pat Gelsinger ( Pat Gelsinger ), with the goal of starting to produce chips for external customers. After Chen Liwu took over in 2025, his strategy became more cautious; he chose to wait for customer demand before advancing with the ambitious chip factory plans.

However, by the end of 2025, Intel had already achieved mass production at its chip factory in Arizona, manufacturing its most advanced 18A chips. Chandrasekaran also stated on Wednesday that Intel's next Arizona factory is expected to begin operations by the end of 2028.

However, Intel has not yet secured any major external customers for these 18A chips from Arizona. Instead, Intel is using these chips to produce processors for its own devices.

Intel was once a dominant force in the chip manufacturing industry, but its 7-nanometer and 10-nanometer process nodes encountered significant delays, resulting in the stock experiencing its worst annual performance ever in 2024. Since then, customers have been reluctant to commit to further cooperation.

Now, as the demand for artificial intelligence reaches record levels and the world's leading chip manufacturer TSMC ( Taiwan Sem token issuance nductor Manufacturing Co ) is struggling to meet capacity, it seems that Intel's opportunity has arrived. According to Jordan Klein, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, even the largest chip manufacturers such as NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, and Broadcom face extremely fierce competition if they want to secure production capacity on TSMC's manufacturing lines.

Analyst Dan Hodgson ( Dan Hutcheson ) believes that Intel can provide customers with another source for chip production.

Hodgson said, "People want a second source so that they can put pressure on TSMC to be honest in their pricing. All the major customers have tested there."

View: Inside Intel's new Arizona factory, the fate of the chip manufacturer is still up in the air