(Associated Press via NewsEdge) Intel has received approval to build a $2.5 billion chip plant in China amid booming Chinese demand for chips used in PCs and mobile phones, the government said.
The factory is planned for the northeastern city of Dalian, the cabinet's National Development and Reform Commission, the country's top economic planning agency, said on its Web site.
Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, has not revealed plans to build a chip plant in Dalian. Intel officials in Beijing and the chipmaker's headquarters declined to comment, saying the company has not made a formal announcement.
Demand for chips in China has soared as the country has risen to become the world's largest population of mobile phone users and as computer sales grow rapidly.
The communist government wants Chinese companies to spend more on developing profitable technology and is encouraging foreign companies to move high-tech facilities to China.
The Intel factory approved for Dalian would use 90-nanometer technology, the NDRC announcement said.
One key way the chip industry measures manufacturing sophistication is the size of the circuitry, and the process Intel plans to use in the China facility means the chip parts will be shrunken down to 90 nanometers, or 90 billionths of a meter.
That suggests that Intel plans to use the facility to manufacture flash memory chips and chipsets, which act as a PC's central nervous system by sending data from the microprocessor to other parts of the computer.
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