Israel is a small country with an outsized influence on the global chip industry. It’s a major source of engineering talent, a hub for international chipmakers and fertile ground for semiconductor startups that big companies often want to acquire.
Intel Corp. has been there for almost 50 years and maintains a network of design and production facilities throughout the country. Nvidia Corp., the largest maker of chips used for artificial intelligence systems, has a big presence in Israel. So does Apple Inc., which designs some of its silicon there, an effort run by an Israeli named Johny Srouji. Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have important chip-design centres there as well.
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Israel is one of the few places outside of East Asia where advanced chip production is done. The war between Israel and Hamas, which has left hundreds of people dead in its first week, threatens to further complicate the chip supply chain.
Intel set up the first outpost in Haifa, Israel, in 1974, just six years after the company’s founding. It would become an essential research and design centre, helping fuel the company’s decadeslong dominance of computer chips.
In 2003, when laptops were taking off, Intel introduced a new line of power-efficient processors equipped with Wi-Fi based on designs first proposed by engineers in Haifa. The team gave it the codename Banias, named after a spring near the Golan Heights that Israel took from Syria in their 1967 conflict. The product would later be known as Centrino and Pentium M.
The company chose Haifa for its proximity to Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, which has produced many of the region’s leading engineers and scientists, including Srouji, whose work would eventually displace Intel from Apple computers.
Some 12,800 people are employed by Intel at five major locations in Israel today, according to the company. Their work includes AI and self-driving cars. Haifa is still responsible for some of what goes into the company’s processors, which retain a dominant share of the PC and server markets.
Besides Haifa, the other main site is a chip production plant in Kiryat Gat. Intel has been expanding that project this year.
Kiryat Gat is southwest of Jerusalem and a 30-minute drive from the Gaza border, which bore the brunt of the violence last weekend. The port city of Haifa is about a 40-minute ride from the border with Lebanon, where the Israeli Defense Forces and Hezbollah have been shelling each other in recent days.
The conflict has already had a terrifying impact. Among the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas fighters is Avinatan Or, an engineer for Nvidia. Videos posted online show Or and his girlfriend Noa Argamani being taken against their will from a music festival that was attacked over the weekend. Nvidia, which cancelled an AI conference scheduled to begin Oct. 15 in Tel Aviv, confirmed the kidnapping.
Many companies also have said their employees are part of a mass call-up of army reservists, which will result in workplace disruptions. Intel declined to comment on the status of its Israeli operations or staff there. “We are closely monitoring the situation in Israel and taking steps to safeguard and support our workers,” the company said in a statement.
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