Intel announced a €5 billion ($5.7 billion) investment on Monday to expand chip production at its Leixlip campus in County Kildare, Ireland, upgrading existing fabs to increase output of Intel 3 wafers for Xeon 6 and next-gen server processors. The program accounts for roughly 30% of Intel's planned 2026 capital expenditure of about $17 billion, adds several hundred permanent roles to a 4,900-strong Irish workforce, and is scheduled to be substantially deployed by the end of 2027. Naga Chandrasekaran, Intel's chief technology and operations officer and general manager of Intel Foundry, told Reuters that "the demand for servers, the demand for AI is driving a significant increase in the need for Intel 3 wafers."

The announcement comes just shy of a year after CEO Lip-Bu Tan cancelled Intel's planned €30 billion fab complex in Magdeburg, Germany, and a €4.6 billion assembly and test plant in Wrocław, Poland. Those cancellations came with a memo in which Tan wrote that Intel had "invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand."