Intel Will Shut Down Its Automotive Business, Lay Off Most of the Department's Employees
(Wednesday June 25, 2025 @11:20AM (BeauHD)
from the already-in-motion dept.)
- Reference: 0178167682
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/25/0135219/intel-will-shut-down-its-automotive-business-lay-off-most-of-the-departments-employees
- Source link:
Intel is [1]shutting down its small automotive division and laying off most of its staff in that group as part of [2]broader cost [3]-cutting efforts to refocus on core businesses like client computing and data centers. Oregon Live reports:
> "Intel plans to wind down the Intel architecture automotive business," the company told employees Tuesday morning in a message viewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive. The company said it will fulfill existing commitments to customers but will lay off "most" employees working in Intel's automotive group. "As we have said previously, we are refocusing on our core client and data center portfolio to strengthen our product offerings and meet the needs of our customers," Intel said in a written statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive. "As part of this work, we have decided to wind down the automotive business within our client computing group. We are committed to ensuring a smooth transition for our customers."
>
> Automotive technology isn't one of Intel's major businesses and the company doesn't report the segment's revenue or employment. But online, the company boasts that 50 million vehicles use Intel processors. Intel says its chips can help enable electric vehicles, provide information to drivers and optimize vehicles' performance. Intel also owns a majority stake in the Israeli company Mobileye, which develops technology for self-driving cars. It doesn't appear the closure of Intel's automotive group will directly affect Mobileye's operations.
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/06/intel-will-shut-down-its-automotive-business-lay-off-most-of-the-departments-employees.html
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/23/0141226/intel-to-slash-over-20-of-workforce-in-major-restructuring-move
[3] https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/21/0251208/intel-will-outsource-marketing-to-accenture-and-ai-laying-off-its-own-workers
> "Intel plans to wind down the Intel architecture automotive business," the company told employees Tuesday morning in a message viewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive. The company said it will fulfill existing commitments to customers but will lay off "most" employees working in Intel's automotive group. "As we have said previously, we are refocusing on our core client and data center portfolio to strengthen our product offerings and meet the needs of our customers," Intel said in a written statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive. "As part of this work, we have decided to wind down the automotive business within our client computing group. We are committed to ensuring a smooth transition for our customers."
>
> Automotive technology isn't one of Intel's major businesses and the company doesn't report the segment's revenue or employment. But online, the company boasts that 50 million vehicles use Intel processors. Intel says its chips can help enable electric vehicles, provide information to drivers and optimize vehicles' performance. Intel also owns a majority stake in the Israeli company Mobileye, which develops technology for self-driving cars. It doesn't appear the closure of Intel's automotive group will directly affect Mobileye's operations.
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/06/intel-will-shut-down-its-automotive-business-lay-off-most-of-the-departments-employees.html
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/23/0141226/intel-to-slash-over-20-of-workforce-in-major-restructuring-move
[3] https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/21/0251208/intel-will-outsource-marketing-to-accenture-and-ai-laying-off-its-own-workers
GOOD. (Score:2)
by Gravis Zero ( 934156 )
Intel has NO business having ANY of their products being integrated with automobiles in anyway. Hell, the only thing that could have possibly been relevant was their GPUs and they have effectively killed the only thing ensuring they were trustworthy, an opensource driver. Naturally, even good drivers couldn't prevent them from being [1]insecure [slashdot.org].
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/23/2046259/ubuntu-to-disable-intel-graphics-security-mitigations-to-boost-gpu-performance-by-up-to-20
Lifespan of cars in the future (Score:3, Insightful)
This type of supply chain breakage is why I think we have already passed peak automobile lifetime (cars built 1990-2010): in the future when critical parts fail there won't be any spares, and unless one is willing to take on 10s of thousands of dollars of firmware modding no workarounds either. I would not expect cars sold after 2010 to have lifetimes of more than 10 years or so.
Re: (Score:2)
This has always been the case though. An example I know of was a dealer had an STS-V in the shop. A fairly low production car, but based off a more generic STS. The V though had a high performance radiator for the extra cooling demand of the engine in it. The radiator was no longer available. Dealer checked some scrap yards and also other dealers. None came up. Dealer tried modifying a plain STS radiator to add more cooling, it leaked. The advisor was telling me it was going to be difficult to tell the owne
Re: (Score:2)
"dealer" was the problem there.
I am sure there is some radiator of sufficient size/cooling that would fit. More than likely it would have required some creativity, creating special mounts, doing something possibly odd like stacking two of them, using something from a different OEM. Which would have gone down a little rabbit hole of needing different hoses or using ones that are not molded, fittings to adapt sizes etc.
No way it was really an unsolvable problem. Some shade tree could have done it but dealers
Re: (Score:2)
Old dependable cars is a textbook example of survivorship bias. Peak auto lifetime is an illusion. Cars have never been built to last.
Automotive parts is a solid business (Score:4, Informative)
Automotive silicon is not really the growth industry that tech investors look for. A quick look at Intel's competitor: NV's quarterly results shows that their data center business is about 90% of their revenue, gaming about 5-6% and automotive is 1.5%.
It's a tiny part of the business for most of these silicon vendors (it was the case for Freescale and TI too). But the margins on automotive are great, and the long term commitments are great too. Basically you get paid every year to warehouse spare components by contract. When the contract ends, the buyer can option to buy out the inventory at a already negotiated price. Or the silicon vendor keeps the components and sells them for pennies on the dollar (Mouser, Digikey, Jameco, etc pick these industrial parts up). Sometimes the silicon vendor is able to write these sales as a loss even though they totally made many times over that to warehouse it, depending on how the accounting for depreciation worked out for them. (there are pros and cons to depreciating too early - I'm not a tax specialists)
It's a solid business, but making car parts is generally not a growth industry, you get a steady income and somewhat recession-proof too. Manufacturers might want to put your camera systems and AI inference into cars, but they don't make a ton of those kinds of decked out cars. And the components are fairly reliable and aren't replaced frequently and almost never upgraded.
Long term, I think a smaller vendor working in China or Taiwan can make all the chips that all the cars in the world need. But car manufactures would have to take on the R&D side so they can fully specify what they want their chips to do for the next 5, 10, and 15 years. If multiple car makers can get together on standardizing some of the digital components and commoditize these parts, then they could save a ton of money and have parts that really are available for decades. But honestly fat chance in that happening.
Car companies are so risk adverse they won't take the problem on. Recently Ford James Fley, Jr is taking flack for pushing ahead with Ford's EV battery plant. Investors and some of the upper management act like it's this big risky thing. While us regular people see it as obvious. You need control of the most expensive component in your EV line up. You can't let your competitors control a part of your supply chain that carries such a significant impact on your manufacturing cost. But in typical backwards automotive industry thinking, getting involved in something that isn't a 50 to 100 year old practice is considered risky. Serious buggy whip maker mentality in the car industry.
Re: (Score:2)
If it's a model that's kind of popular for the region I don't see this problem in practice. Once it's a few years old there are tons of third party making parts for things that break with any frequency, including quite specialized parts. And of course lots of parts that are still good coming from totaled cars (which is a very low bar nowadays too, sadly). There MIGHT be some kind of "part locking" Apple-style but I haven't seen it, and mechanics are still just "black box" troubleshooting for everything that
Re: (Score:2)
Even Tesas had a normal 12v lead acid car battery until just a few years ago, even though of course it had its huge lithium battery from its inception. I guess even a "clean sheet" design is not actually a clean sheet below a certain level, when they need to re-use traditional components and designs.
[1]https://electrek.co/2021/02/02... [electrek.co]
[1] https://electrek.co/2021/02/02/tesla-model-s-x-get-rid-lead-acid-12v-battery-moves-li-ion/
Re: (Score:2)
In any case it's not happening yet , since the average age of cars on the road continues to increase:
[1]https://hedgescompany.com/blog... [hedgescompany.com]
Actually it astounds me that the average age of passenger cars on the road is now 14 years. It's difficult to believe.
[1] https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2024/02/average-age-of-cars-trucks/