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Intel Considers $11 Billion Fab in Israel
Late last year Intel announced massive plans to increase its global chip production capacities by upgrading, expanding, and equipping four of its fabs. As it turns out, the company is not going to stop there and is considering to build a brand new fab in Israel, which will cost $11 billion.
Moshe Kahlon, Israeli Finance Minister, on Tuesday confirmed that Intel had applied for a grant of about $1 billion from the government for its new investment plan to build a fab that would cost $11 billion. If everything goes as planned, the investment will not only be the biggest of its kind in Israel, but Intel will also build the largest semiconductor fab in the region. Furthermore, the expansion will add 1,000 new employees to Intel's staff of approximately 13,000 in Israel.
[...] Intel and Ministry of Finance reportedly started talks about the new fab several weeks ago, so the production facility is a few years away.
Previously: Intel to Spend $5 Billion on Fab in Israel, Likely to Produce 10nm Chips
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MostCynical on Wednesday January 30 2019, @02:48AM (3 children)
If they a ensure appropriate (known and controlled) backdoors, the value of the future secrets they collect should be worth alot more than the subsidy - note, too that "subsidy" can include tax write-downs, rather than direct cash.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday January 30 2019, @02:56AM (2 children)
You do know Intel has had one of their major design teams in Israel for a long time, that is where the backdoors generally get inserted. Good thinking though, gotta account for those "non-economic factors" when playing International Geopolitics in the big leagues.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday January 30 2019, @04:12AM
As well, having the Israeli security forces available to help keep others* out of the facilitywould be a bonus.
Other governments
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @04:14AM
The former kernel team was in Portland and got eliminated in favor of moving all Intel ME design and development to Israel. All of the ARC-era Intel ME flaws would have been designed and developed in Israel as part of the Intel ME userspace. The move to Minix allowed them to eliminate the previous kernel (ThreadX) making the Portland group redundant, and pulling all assets in-house. Given the fact that 90 percent of non-embedded computer systems are running Intel, and at least 1/3 to 1/2 of those are running Skylake+ cpus now, having complete control of Intel ME would give Mossad unparalleled access to computer systems of every nation with the ability to write and inject bespoke payloads to known foreign targets, as well as enable traditional x86 exploits to allow enabling the ME from userspace and injecting custom payloads or activation existing obfuscated payloads to perform actions below the operating system before sending it out in the guise of existing network traffic where it can be intercepted and exploited either without triggering IDS at all, or only on an encrypted payload giving no evidence of how it was enacted.
Likely this is being done on a regular basis and is part of the focus for China's domestic CPU initiative. One common trait both the Chinese and Israeli/Jewish sympathizers have is the ability to tap foreign resources for their great and glorious culture in Israel/China. The difference however is that the Israelis have managed to provide themselves the political capital, through both the Holocaust and multi-generational grooming of assets, to have their political malfeasance swept up, even by the countries whose trust they compromise. If you have any doubts, look into Israeli purchases of military technology, not only from the US/EU, but also China and Russia, including domestically classified technology, which was then exchanged with the other hostile powers for reverse engineering purposes. Does that sound like the kind of foreign power you want with the majority manpower control of one of the lynchpin fabs of the largest market monopoly chipmaker on the planet?
A final point of research to prove or refute the threat posed by Israel would be to look into which processor generations and features were designed at Intel's Haifa campus and which exploitable cpu misfeatures/optimizations were implemented during their time there. If more than half of them were, it would stand to reason that not all of those 'mistakes' were unintended. The hardware design and security research going on in Israel is unparallelled in most of the world and even in the parts that are as competent most programs are underfunded.