Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger today dedicated an unspecified amount of capacity at its Kildare, Ireland, foundry to support the growing demand for automotive silicon. The move marks a ramp in the company’s newly formed Intel Foundry Services business, announced in March, and comes as companies in nearly every industry face higher component prices and longer lead times as a result of the chip crunch.

In a keynote at IAA Mobility in Munich, Germany, Gelsinger said the “digitization of everything” would drive the share of semiconductors in premium vehicles to more than 20% by 2030 — a five-fold increase compared to 2019.

Intel expects the automotive semiconductor market to become a key growth area as it looks to expand its foundry business. It predicts the automotive silicon market will reach $115 billion by the end of the decade driven by the rise of electric and autonomous vehicles.

To meet growing demand in this area, semiconductor manufacturers including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics have announced hundreds of billions in new spending, and Intel is no different.

In his keynote, Gelsinger dedicated foundry capacity at its Ireland fab to support automakers and launched the Intel Foundry Services Accelerator program to help customers adapt integrated circuits to modern nodes.

Most advanced semiconductors used worldwide — including those in automobiles — are built using either 28-nanometer or 40-nanometer processes, according to an Analysys Mason report. Because of this, existing designs for things like engine control units need to be adapted before they can be manufactured in Intel's facilities.

Intel plans to combat this by forming a new design team to help customers make this transition while also offering a range of industry-standard intellectual property.

“This new era of sustained demand for semiconductors needs bold, big thinking,” Gelsinger said. “As CEO of Intel, I have the great privilege to be in a position to marshal the energies of 116,000 employees and a massive chip-design and manufacturing ecosystem to meet the demand.”

It should be noted that Intel itself is no stranger to automotive silicon. The company's Mobileye autonomous driving division has been a bright spot for the embattled chipmaker in recent quarters. In its most recent earnings quarter, Mobileye grew 124% to 327 million in revenues.

Intel’s push into the automotive sector is only the beginning for the chipmaker. In March, just a month after Gelsinger took the reins, the chipmaker announced it was opening its foundry operations to contract manufacturing under its independent design manufacturing (IDM) 2.0 initiative.

And in support of this effort, the chipmaker formed the Intel Foundry Services business unit and announced two new leading-edge fabs in Arizona at an estimated cost of $20 billion.

The company is now looking to add two more facilities in Europe and plans to invest as much as $95 billion over the next 10 years.

The expansion plans come as companies in nearly every industry feel the pressure of the chip crunch. Many publicly traded technology companies have cited the semiconductor shortage as a potential, if not immediate, headwind.

Most recently, Dell warned supply constraints was forced to the company to raise prices, calling semiconductors a chokepoint.

“In aggregate, the semiconductor industry needs more capacity,” COO Jeff Clarke said on the company’s second-quarter fiscal 2022 earnings call. He expects the constraints will go into next year, due to a lack of investment in fab capacity and the time it takes to crank up that production.

And just a few months earlier, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins boasted the company saw its strongest demand in nearly a decade, but supply chain challenges, spurred by the chip shortage, were getting in the way.

While Intel’s decision to dedicate existing foundry capacity to automakers may alleviate the bottleneck for some, as a whole, analysts and industry leaders agree solving the semiconductor shortage long-term will neither be quick nor cheap.

Neither of Intel’s previously announced Arizona chip fabs will come online until 2024 at the earliest, with the yet-to-be finalized European fabs likely to take as long, if not longer to open.

That hasn’t, however, stopped foundry operators from announcing massive expansion plans. Late last month, Samsung Electronics announced $205 billion in new capex spending to expand its foundry business and better compete with its rivals.

The move came months after TSMC, by far the world’s largest and most advanced foundry operator, announced it would spend $100 billion over the next three years to bolster its foundry capacity.

The chipmaker has already announced a $12 billion foundry expansion destined for Arizona. When it opens in 2024, the plant will produce roughly 20,000 wafers a month.

However, all of these foundry expansions have one thing in common. They’re focused on leading-edge process nodes, not the older process tech that’s used in automobiles today.

It’s good news for companies making high-tech electronics like servers, smartphones, or laptops, but a real problem for many companies that rely on a steady supply of chips built on older, cheaper process nodes, Darshan Naik, EVP at consulting firm Capgemini, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview.

However, as evidenced by today's announcements, it appears Intel plans to work with customers to adapt their designs to newer processes rather than accommodating the older tech.