Inside Intel’s AI chip factory where humans pose the biggest threat

When I was told I couldn’t wear regular deodorant, I thought visiting an Intel chip factory would be different.

Or lotion. Or hairspray. Or maybe makeup.

Before I boarded the plane to Oregon, Intel sent my videographer and I a long list of things that could not be worn or brought into the Hillsboro factory. There is no velcro. No Bluetooth. You can’t use your phone unless it’s in airplane mode. The list went on.

That was my first clue that I was entering a place where completely different rules applied.

In March, after months of planning with Intel, I had rare access to one of their chip factories. This is what the technology industry would call a manufacturing plant or fab. Under the hood, Intel makes some of the world’s most advanced semiconductors.

Chips power almost every part of modern life: laptops, phones, chatbots, washing machines, fighter jets, and the data centers behind AI.

Demand for these chips is rapidly increasing, with annual semiconductor sales expected to reach $1 trillion by 2027. I went behind the scenes to see the complex and delicate manufacturing process, which is very controlled. The way I think about what clean means has changed forever.

What do you need to get inside an Intel factory?

On a rainy Oregon morning, I arrived wearing my best walking shoes, per Intel’s instructions. We’re going to be covering a lot of ground, and they weren’t kidding. The factory in front of us was huge, bigger than an aircraft carrier.

After walking for about 10 minutes, I arrived at the gear cleaning room. Just beyond was a room filled with Intel chips estimated to be worth billions of dollars.

“Every tiny speck can cause a defect that can destroy a chip,” Chris Orth, Intel’s vice president of manufacturing and development, told me, and my guide for the day.

I wiped down all my camera equipment with sterile wipes. It’s not just the obvious surface. We stretched out the tripod legs and wiped them one by one, then folded them and wiped them again, looking for nooks and crannies where dust might be hiding.

Then came the gown room. The room was so large that it could have swallowed up a New York studio apartment many times over. It was packed wall-to-wall with bunny suits worth about $1,000 each, according to Intel.

You have to wear it that day. But first I had to figure out how to put it on.

“So you want to crumple the suit so the sleeves don’t touch the ground here,” Orth said, pulling the hood up.

All the pieces had to be connected in the correct order. The costume was tucked into the hood. Boots that come with the suit. My first pair of gloves ended up tucked under my sleeve. The second pair was placed on top to catch any particles of skin that my hands shed.

I have visited the factory before and was concerned about visible contaminants, such as bracelets falling off and earrings falling off. Intel was concerned about what it couldn’t see. The kind your body releases constantly without asking permission.

This also explains why I had to leave my notebook outside. Normal paper emits microscopic particles, but here even that can be enough to damage the chip. Intel gave me a special cleanroom notebook that doesn’t fall out.

Then I stepped onto the factory floor.

Inter’s most valuable room

In such a tightly controlled place, I was strangely excited by what looked like hot pink equipment everywhere. But it wasn’t actually pink.

The huge room glowed under yellow light to protect the chips. Other wavelengths may damage the chip during manufacturing.

“Under yellow light, anything that looks pink to the eye is actually red,” Tyler Osborn, Intel’s director of advanced packaging technology development, told me later, gently bringing me back to reality.

But nothing about this factory felt real.

There were more robots than humans. The few people there all looked the same, wearing hooded suits. Employees have told me that they often recognize each other by how they move.

“You can tell how people walk,” Osborn said. His voice was muffled by the layer that covered everything but his eyes.

Robots zipped along overhead tracks, transporting sealed boxes of wafers (thin slices of silicon from which chips are formed) around the factory, keeping them out of human hands.

Humans proved too inefficient for this task. Robots must move thousands of wafers a day. Needless to say, humans can be clumsy.

I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if someone in a hurry tripped and the box of wafers went flying.

“Mistakes are very costly,” Orth said. “Just a single wafer can range from $50,000 to $500,000.”

Each robot carries 25 wafers at a time.

“So now just one box is worth millions of dollars,” he said.

Even the footsteps felt dangerous.

The tip is about the size of a fingernail. But Intel doesn’t just control that small area. We are trying to stabilize the entire factory, focusing on microscopic items.

“We are building the world’s smallest capabilities in some of the world’s largest factories,” Orth said.

The factory is built in layers, and the foundation is designed to absorb external shocks, such as earthquakes, nearby machinery, and even low-frequency vibrations from air conditioning units in adjacent buildings.

“The culprit is micro-vibration,” Bob McMillan, Intel’s life safety and systems manager, told me.

That was the moment I became extremely conscious of my own footsteps. I felt like a giant moving through a world built for something much smaller and more delicate than me.

Everything in the factory was designed to protect the chip, and I wondered what would happen if its controls failed even slightly.

So I asked what would happen if beard hair got inside these machines.

“It’s over,” McMillan said.

“Hair is huge,” Orth later explained.

A single human hair is 1 million atoms thick. Some of the structures Intel is building are only a few atoms wide.

The whole factory works like a machine

No one could be heard over the constant noise of the huge tools.

That’s when I realized that this building wasn’t just filled with machines. That was one.

The floor was also moving.

It stretched out below us like a giant metal sieve, full of holes as far as the eye could see. They were there to remove particles from the wafer, and within 60 seconds they caught the rogue one that escaped from our suit.

“We’re replacing all the air in this plant this fast,” McMillan told me.

The reason we filter air over and over again is because at any given moment, there are no more than 8 particles larger than 1 micron suspended in every cubic meter of air. There are probably millions of people in the room where you are sitting right now.

For me, that was difficult to understand.

I was standing in one of the cleanest places on earth, and I felt both relieved and vaguely uneasy. My ordinary life suddenly seemed impossibly dirty.

Why chips are difficult to make

It takes about three months to manufacture one chip, but there is little chance of anything going wrong. During this time, approximately 2,000 steps and thousands of machines are spread throughout the factory.

“We have the clean room space of 12 soccer fields here,” Orth said.

He later said it would cost about $20 billion to build such a factory. By comparison, One World Trade Center cost approximately $3.9 billion to build.

Despite the high price tag, the U.S. government has made building chips in the U.S. a top priority.

About 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan, and the U.S. government views the island as a major geopolitical risk as China threatens to take over the island by force.

That’s why the White House insists the U.S. needs more factories like these, no matter how difficult it is to manufacture these chips. Currently, Intel is the only American company that designs and manufactures advanced logic chips in the United States.

I left thinking about how fragile modern life is.

When I returned to the dressing room and took off my hood, I realized that I had almost forgotten what the people I spent the day with actually looked like.

Then I got my phone back and went back to normal life, but I still had a thought I couldn’t shake. That means we live in a world powered by chips.

But to create them, we need to create an entire environment designed to protect them from us.