Intel plans to spend $US6 billion this year to meet burgeoning worldwide demand for computer chips, a company official confirmed yesterday.
"We originally thought we would spend $5 billion this year, but we are spending a lot of money on equipment, and demand (for chips) has been very high this year," Howard High, an Intel spokesman said yestrday in an interview at company headquarters in Santa Clara, California. "I think $6 billion is the right number (for yearly spending)."
The majority of the expenditure will go toward increasing production capacity, while as much as 20 percent of spending will be earmarked for production of flash memory, executives said.
"We are clearly looking to expand capacity as we move forward with microprocessors, chipsets and flash memory being in demand for devices of all kinds," Paul Otellini, executive vice president for the Intel architecture group, said in an interview yesterday.
Intel recently purchased a manufacturing facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado that will be used in part to produce flash memory chips, Otellini said.