Intel plans to add 4,000 workers this year

Intel will hire 4,000 workers in the United States this year, primarily in product development and research and development.

The company seeks to hire "permanent, highly skilled employees," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said during a speech in Hillsboro (OR) where President Barack Obama toured a microprocessor factory. Intel currently has about 82,000 employees. Intel also announced it would invest around $5 billion to build a chip plant in Chandler (AZ). The plant will be dedicated to making chips for PCs, consumer electronics, and mobile devices, Intel said in a statement. Construction of the plant will begin in the middle of this year and should be completed in 2013, Intel said. The $5 billion commitment is in addition to Intel's investment of between $6 billion and $8 billion to manufacture new chips for PCs, smartphones, consumer electronics, and embedded devices, which the company announced in October last year. Those funds will go toward building a plant in Oregon, and to upgrading factories to make chips using the new 22-nanometer process. Such chips would be faster and more power-efficient than the company's current PC chips made using the 32-nm process. Intel at the time said the $6 billion to $8 billion investment would help create approximately 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs in the United States during the construction phase, and would eventually create up to 1,000 highly skilled and high-wage manufacturing jobs.