"Made in the USA" Intel's Fab 52 in Arizona Starts 18A Mass Production

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Intel provides insights into Fab 52 in Arizona and shows the next Xeon generation in Clearwater Forest. The Group is ramping up the 18A process there to high volumes and anchoring the production of future client and server chips in the USA. With Xeon 6+, a condensed, more efficient platform is emerging for data centers.

Fab 52 is the fifth high-volume factory on the Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona. It is considered the US home of the 18A node and is scheduled to go into mass production in 2025. According to Intel, the first products on 18A will be produced there, starting with Panther Lake for the client sector, as well as the next generations for servers. The factory is part of the more than 100 billion dollar package to strengthen American chip production. Earlier pilot runs took place in Oregon. Now Intel is moving the ramp-up to Arizona.

Clearwater Forest: Scaling E-Cores, Efficiency Counts

At the start of mass production in Fab 52, Intel showed a first glimpse of Clearwater Forest, which will be launched on the market as the Xeon 6+. The pure e-core approach is still aimed at dense, energy-efficient data centers for hyperscalers, cloud providers and telcos. Intel has officially announced the launch of Clearwater Forest in the first half of 2026. The key data continues the course: up to 288 E-Cores, an increase in IPC (instructions per cycle) of 17 percent compared to the previous E-Core generation (Crestmont in Sierra Forest) and significantly more throughput per rack. DDR5 up to 8000 MT/s and a broader memory interface increase the bandwidth; the platform remains designed for 1- and 2-socket servers. According to industry reports, the number of memory channels increases to twelve, PCIe 5.0 and CXL 2.0 are on board.

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RibbonFET and PowerVia: What Makes 18A Special from a Technical Point of View

The 18A node combines RibbonFET transistors with the PowerVia backside power concept. Compared to Intel 3, the manufacturer claims up to 15 percent better performance per watt and around 30 percent higher density. In practice, this allows for more compact compute tiles and higher clock rates with the same energy budget. For Clearwater Forest, Intel relies on a chiplet architecture: twelve compute tiles on 18A, three active base tiles on Intel 3 and two I/O tiles on Intel 7, connected via Foveros Direct 3D stacking and EMIB.

With this production facility, Intel is firmly tying its leading logic production back to the USA. For operators of large data centers, Clearwater Forest promises a higher workload density per rack and leeway in terms of energy balance. Relevant for the German market: OEMs and cloud providers often plan platform changes over several quarters. The visible ramp-up in Arizona with a clear schedule for Xeon 6+ provides planning security. The decisive factor remains whether Intel confirms the announced efficiency gains in the field and how quickly board partners deliver the platforms. (mc)