China – Intel will maintain its policy against building advanced silicon wafer fabs in China or elsewhere in Asia, a senior company spokesman said.

Howard High, Intel’s strategic communications manager, said the company would keep those critical chip production sites in North America, reported the Financial Times.

“The microprocessor investments we will continue to pursue in Asia involve our R&D labs, as well as our test and assembly facilities,” he said.

Multinational chipmakers, such as Intel, see risks in setting up a fab infrastructure in the mainland. Using other manufacturing options could lead to more productive and cost-effective operations.

High said it did not make business sense for Intel to make such an advanced investment in China or another Asian site because the company already had such facilities planned for the US, where it also had a skilled manpower base. “Besides investing more than US$2 billion to build an advanced 300mm wafer fab, recruiting and training people in China to run and operate such a facility would be a huge task,” he said.

Faced with increased competition from AMD, Intel has been on track with 300mm wafer production at its Fab D1C in Oregon this year and Fab 11X in New Mexico. It scaled back plans for such production in Ireland and Israel.