Mary Springowski has been obsessed with microchips ever since the accident in 2016. That was the year a loaded parts cart at a Ford plant in northeastern Ohio rammed into her leg and tore her Achilles tendon, laying her up for weeks.
A 25-year veteran of Ford and the United Auto Workers, Springowski was a team leader at the Cleveland Engine Plant, building 4-cylinders for a few different vehicles. She was also a member of her hometown city council in Lorain, Ohio, about 25 miles to the west along Lake Erie. Lorain, a city of about 65,000, used to thrive on factories: plants that built ships and cars, forged steel and bronze. One facility made close to 16 million Ford vehicles over nearly five decades—Thunderbirds, Fairlanes, Falcons—before it closed in 2005. Lorain is still dominated by the campuses of two huge steel plants: One of them had just gone idle earlier in the year of Springowski’s accident, and the other had just laid off some 800 workers, citing distant fluctuations in the international market. Lorain, Springowski says, is “not OK.”
So after the injury, Springowski spent a lot of time on the couch with her laptop open and her leg elevated, trying to solve Lorain’s problems. The city had recently been ordered by the Environmental Protection Agency to do tens of millions of dollars in repairs to its aging sewer system. The town was proposing to raise water rates, and people were complaining. All that got Springowski thinking about the value of water: Lorain sits on Lake Erie and at the mouth of one of its major tributaries, the Black River. She Googled, “What industries use the most water in their production?”
Pretty soon she had her answer: microchips. Turned out chipmakers all over the world were getting worried about drought. Springowski got on Facebook and wrote a post pointing out that Lorain had exactly what the semiconductor industry needed: “We have water! Lots of water!” Springowski decided that chips were going to save Lorain. She kept talking and posting about it for years. “That’s just how my mind works,” she told me.
It wasn’t until a massive global chip shortage hit during the Covid-19 pandemic that some people started to listen. At work, Springowski’s assembly line started getting a lot of downtime. “We had engines that were just sitting,” she says—waiting to be put into cars that were waiting on chips, while junior workers collected unemployment. “We had people who didn’t have money for gas.”
Springowski read that the United Auto Workers was pushing for the US to make its own chips, so she sent an email to union leaders and an Ohio congresswoman. “If you’re looking at chip manufacturing, you need to look at Lorain,” she wrote. She got no answer. Springowski did not let it go. “We have a GOLDEN opportunity here!!!” she posted on Facebook the following year. “You want something big? Like the shipyards and Ford were? This is it!!!!”
Mary Springowski in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio.
Photograph: Ruddy Roye
Finally, Springowski realized she had to go directly to the source. She opened the email she’d sent to the UAW, rewrote it, and started researching all the companies that make chips, trying to figure out how to reach their executives. She paid $3.99 on RocketReach.com to get the email address of Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world. And on April 28, 2021, during a spell when her Ford plant was short some parts—downtime, again—Springowski started hitting send. Her emails went to Gelsinger and the CEOs of as many chip manufacturers as she could think of, about a dozen in all, listing the reasons why they should come to Lorain: an abundance of fresh water; access to a major port, roads, and railways; a thriving community college poised to train a new workforce.
She ended her appeal with trademark Springowski enthusiasm. “Let’s look for a way to make this happen! Nothing is off the table and everything is open for discussion and consideration!”
The very next day, Springowski received a response from the senior director of state government relations at Intel. He said the company was in the process of choosing a site for a new set of chip-manufacturing plants—the first new US-based Intel site in decades. Ohio hadn’t even been under consideration when Springowski’s email arrived. “I would be happy to discuss Intel’s site requirements and the opportunity for Lorain,” he wrote, and asked to meet the next day. Springowski yelled from the living room, so loud it sounded like someone had died.
“What?!” her husband yelled back from the kitchen.
“Intel wrote back!”
“No effing way!”
“Effing way.”
A Zoom call was arranged. Springowski looped in officials from Lorain’s Port and Finance Authority and, later, regional economic development teams. Eventually, she was in direct contact with Gelsinger.
What Springowski didn’t know was that, at the time, the CEO was in the middle of a massive campaign to persuade Congress it should heavily subsidize domestic chip manufacturing. The idea was to “re-shore” the industry after decades of dominance by the Taiwanese chipmaking giant TSMC and, in distant second place, Samsung in South Korea. It was a matter of national security: The supply chain of microchips had totally broken down during Covid, and it could easily break down again if there was an earthquake or, worse, a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
Chips, of course, are in everything; they power cars, phones, refrigerators, military weapon systems, and—most important to many policymakers these days—artificial intelligence. The US manufactures fewer chips than ever before, only 12 percent of the world’s supply, down from 37 percent in 1990. Asia now accounts for 70 percent.
Gelsinger pointed out to lawmakers that both TSMC and Samsung—and more recently, chipmakers in China—have received huge subsidies from their governments. The only way for the US to compete, he argued, was with similar levels of government support. And to show that Intel was serious about doing its part, Gelsinger made an announcement in January 2022: Eight months after that first Zoom meeting with Springowski, Gelsinger declared that Intel was bringing its massive new made-in-America project, plus thousands of jobs, to Ohio—a $28 billion endeavor that would be the largest single investment in the state’s history.
The superload makes its way across rural southern Ohio.
Photograph: Ruddy Roye
That summer Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which earmarks more than $52 billion in grants, loans, and other benefits to chip manufacturers—with the largest portion, $8.5 billion in grants and $11 billion in loans, going to Intel. The bill was born under President Trump and signed by Biden, a vanishingly rare instance of alignment on how to create US jobs and counter China.
The trouble is that Intel has serious baggage. The company was utterly dominant when Windows PCs were the hottest thing in tech, but through a series of blunders, it missed out on building the application processors for what came next: smartphones, then AI. Now, just as the US has started describing Intel as its national champion in the chipmaking arms race, the business ramifications of all those missteps are coming due: Over the past several months Intel’s stock price has plummeted, and it has laid off 15,000 workers, begun a major restructuring, and faced a swirl of rumors that it will be broken up or even sold outright.
Gelsinger says he just needs time to turn the company around. “Intel was a decade-plus in making bad decisions,” he told me. “I always said it was a five-year journey to get us back. We’re at year three and a half.” The question is, will Gelsinger’s plans come together before Intel falls apart? And what about the states and communities that may now be counting on Intel to save them?
For Springowski the news that Intel was coming to Ohio was bittersweet: She’d succeeded in guiding Intel to her state—but not to Lorain. After weighing its options, the company had settled on a huge swath of farmland in New Albany, a small town outside the state capital of Columbus.
Building a microchip fabrication facility, or fab, is a proposition of otherworldly complexity. It requires infra-structure and specialized equipment on a scale that evokes modern-day pyramid building—all for the sake of mass-producing objects measured in nano-meters. And over the next several years, all that monumental stuff would be converging on some fields in central Ohio. The site had a lot going for it, but unlike Lorain, it had no port; the closest one was 140 miles away. So Intel had to figure out how to move everything, mile by slow mile, across half the state.
It’s super early one morning in the summer of 2024, hours before I want to be awake, but also hours before the day will get wicked hot. I’m standing in the very southern part of Ohio near the town of Portsmouth, about 200 miles south of Lorain, on a floodplain above a bend in the Ohio River. I’m in a parking lot across from a gas station, next to a restaurant called Mex-Itali (“The Best of Both Worlds!”). About two dozen guys—and yes, they’re all guys—are milling around me, putting on helmets and yellow safety vests, drinking coffee and smoking. One of them is named Moose.
We’ve all gathered here because about 100 feet away there’s a spot where one two-lane road meets another two-lane road at a 90-degree angle. This would not be interesting on most days, but about an hour from now this enormous, and I mean enormous … thing on 172 wheels will come rumbling up to make the turn.
The guys in the Mex-Itali parking lot are talking about how it’s going to work. Moose runs a quick safety briefing, reminds everyone to hydrate, tells the guys to mind their manners when talking over the radio.
The crew that moves Intel’s superloads across Ohio includes about two dozen workers from cable companies, power companies, hauling companies, local police, and the highway patrol.
Photograph: Ruddy RoyePhotograph: Ruddy Roye
It took nearly two years of planning to get here. This is one of about two dozen “superloads”—pieces of highway cargo that weigh more than 120,000 pounds—that will be lumbering across Ohio for Intel. Today’s load, number 13, is 280 feet long, 23 feet tall, and 20 feet wide. The gargantuan apparatus, weighing nearly 1 million pounds, is called, very anticlimactically, a cold box. It was made by a European company, shipped to New Orleans, brought by barge up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and offloaded at a rudimentary -purpose-built port near here—and now it needs to get transported overland to the site that Intel hopes will one day become the largest source of AI chips in the world.
To do that, it turns out you need seven days, a bunch of trucks, a lot of permits, all these dudes—from cable companies, power companies, hauling companies—plus a handful of local cops and highway patrol officers. All along the route, you need to physically move power lines and traffic lights just so the load can make it through. And because it’s so disruptive to the people who live along the route, the biggest superloads need to be delivered before the school year starts.
We hear it before we see it—a low but loud hum coming from the west.
A cold box, by the way, is part of something called an air separation unit. To make microchips, your factory floor needs to be a cleanroom, because even a microscopic speck of dust can wreck a silicon wafer. So you need to separate air into its component gases and use the nitrogen to remove any other gases, moisture, and particles from all supplies and tools. (Other air components are also used in the manufacturing process.) Eventually, four of these cold boxes will be stood up vertically, like skyscrapers, at Intel’s new, 1,000-acre site.
Along the route, the superloads have a following. People watch for updates from the Ohio Department of Transportation on Facebook. In the comments, many are supportive—one woman offers the crew blackberry cobbler—some are mad about getting stuck in traffic, some are psyched about the logistics of moving something so large. Some want to watch it all go by.
Emily Stone brought her camp chair. Her friends call her the Load Chaser. This is her second superload. “Small town America—this stuff doesn’t happen,” she says. She was born here, grew up here, loves it here. Back in the day Portsmouth had shoe factories, a steel mill, a brickyard. A big plant nearby used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons—back when that was the technology that superpowers competed over. Stone’s dad worked there for 35 years. He died of leukemia after the plant stopped enriching uranium in 2001. A middle school nearby later closed after testing positive for radioactive material. Stone has been protesting the plant operator’s refusal to take public responsibility.
After most industry died out, Portsmouth became a poster town for the opioid epidemic. At one point it had the highest number of pill mills per capita in the country; it was later the setting of a seminal book about the crisis called Dreamland. In the early 2000s, according to the book, OxyContin served as a local currency. One woman said she was able to buy a car with pills. Stone, who worked as a pharmacy tech at the time, says she knew people who profited from opioids and people who died from opioids.
So for Stone, the superload is a fun distraction, yes. But as it makes its way from one of the poorest parts of Ohio toward one of the richest, she gets why some people in the area are skeptical, or worse. “They’re already on edge,” she says. “And then you have these big, huge loads coming through that nobody really understands.”
“Does anybody even wonder exactly where these superloads came from to begin with?” writes one man on Facebook.
“I’m just disgusted by the whole darn thing,” posts another. “Big business tends to trample on everyone, at every turn, while brainwashing folks into think[ing] they are doing favors for us.”
“They don’t benefit anyone in southern Ohio at all,” writes one more.
Stone and I hear it before we see it—a low but loud hum coming from the west. It’s a giant white box that’s longer than the fuselage of a 747. It takes two semi tractors to move it, one pulling in the front and one pushing from the back. There’s a third just to help push the super-load up hills; it’s on standby the rest of the time. Two guys are posted on a little deck at the back of the load, manning a steering console that helps guide the cold box through tight turns.
I jump in a state car with a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Transportation named Matt Bruning. He’s a former news radio reporter who says AI is now doing advertising voice-overs at one of his old stations. Bruning and Moose have gotten kinda Facebook famous for being part of the crew. “Super Load #13 is making the turn,” Bruning posts. We cruise just ahead of it and bear north into Ohio.
Intel wanted us here. It was their idea that I follow the superload. The company has deployed what feels like a small but happy army of people in matching T-shirts to gin up excitement in the towns along the route, try to deflect annoyed people when traffic backs up, and flood the zone with fun facts. They put up Intel tents, pass out Intel noisemakers and Intel toys to the kids, set up Intel booths next to food trucks. They strap people into VR headsets to show them what working in a fab looks like: engineers in white bunny suits walking around a sterile room full of very expensive machines.
Back with the convoy, we have officially entered the wicked hot part of the day, and we haven’t even made it out of Portsmouth. The superload travels about 6 mph on average, and now a belt has snapped in the engine of the steering console. While a crew works to fix it, the entire convoy has stopped.
People have come out on porches to watch some guys in bucket trucks loosen the big, cantilevered extension arms that suspend stoplights above an intersection. When the load comes through they’ll swing those arms out of the way, then swing them back. One group of spectators is watching from outside a drug rehab center. That’s what Portsmouth is known for these days—a place where people with addiction can come for treatment, counseling, job training, and jobs. The author of Dreamland eventually came back to write a new chapter on Portsmouth, about how the town has remade itself since the worst of the opioid crisis.
Bruning suggests we just stay in the car with the AC on. But then we realize we’re stopped near an old-school joint called Malt Shops that advertises “Ice Cream, Shakes, Sundaes, Sandwiches, and Footers.” A handful of crew guys and Intel flacks and I go in and order some of everything.
The crew is from all over. Joe Jones and his guys drove down from Detroit. He used to work for a company that made parts for Ford. Before Covid, he says, auto work was great. After the chip shortage, “too much stress.” Ford vehicles are “chipped up,” he says, each one with hundreds, even thousands, of microchips. The car can even be deactivated if you haven’t made your payment. Chips, he says, are “what the next war’s gonna be about.” Now Jones works for his cousin’s utility company, helping to raise power lines out of the way of the superload.
Rick and Julia Miller are from northern Florida. He used to supervise roofing crews but got laid off during Covid. She raised high-end chickens that laid -mahogany-brown eggs. A friend told them they could see the country and make money in the pilot-car business. Now the two, who are in their seventies, lead the superload caravan in a truck with orange flags and one of those big yellow signs that says “OVERSIZE LOAD.”
The superload’s overland route from Manchester to New Albany, Ohio, after traveling by barge up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. A makeshift new port had to be constructed in Manchester to offload Intel’s supplies.
Danny Hoeck is from central Kentucky. He drives the lead semi pulling the superload. He’s been driving trucks for almost 50 years. “I retired two years ago,” he says, laughing. “I just ain’t quit yet.” He says he keeps getting called for jobs because there aren’t enough people qualified to do the work.
And then there’s Moose. He’s big, of course, has a sharp meme game on the socials. His full name is Kieran Drylie, and he’s from New Jersey. We start hearing chatter on the radio that the steering console has been fixed. We finally see the superload inching up the road toward the Malt Shops. Moose’s boss later tells me that rather than taking apart the engine and replacing the broken belt, they just went and got an entirely different engine and installed that instead.
Pat Gelsinger came back to Intel to fix it.
The first time he started working at the company, he was just 18 years old, and Intel was at the very center of the tech industry. Moore’s law—the observation turned prophecy that the number of transistors on a microchip keeps doubling every two years without getting much more expensive—had been coined by his boss, cofounder and CEO Gordon Moore. Intel had invented the world’s very first commercially available microprocessor and helped establish Silicon Valley as a place that wasn’t primarily about fruit trees. People called it one of the “four horsemen” of tech.
Gelsinger was part of all that. He was chief architect of the first processor to contain more than a million transistors. But by the time his first stint at the company ended—when he was “nudged out,” as he has put it, as chief technology officer in 2009—Intel had already started to ride into a ditch.
Intel was still making massive profits in the PC chip market. But in 2006 the company’s then CEO, Paul Otellini, opted to pass up a deal with Steve Jobs to build chips for a new Apple device. Otellini figured its sales would be weak. It was the iPhone. After that, the entire mobile phone sector adopted a chip standard that wasn’t Intel’s.
Then, a couple of years later, a bunch of artificial intelligence researchers started training neural networks—long believed to be a technological dead end—using a chip architecture designed by Nvidia. Their impressive results rang in the breathless current era of AI, along with Nvidia’s dominance of it. (To make matters worse: Over the past 20 years, Intel has reportedly had the chance to acquire major stakes in Nvidia and OpenAI but passed on both of them.)
Like an increasing number of Intel’s competitors, Nvidia was a “fabless” company—one that designed chips and then outsourced their production to chip foundries in Asia, primarily TSMC and Samsung. For the most part, Intel stuck to making its own -leading-edge chips. That might have turned out to be a strong play, says G. Dan Hutcheson, a semiconductor industry expert, but in the early 2010s Intel adopted a new manufacturing technique in its fabs that proved too complex and yielded too few chips.
These errors set Intel so far back that by the end of the 2010s, Hutcheson says, TSMC was the only company in the world that could manufacture the most cutting-edge processors. To the US government, that started to look hugely problematic—because of the company’s proximity to China. Then came Covid and the great chip shortage, which spurred Washington’s sense of urgency even more.
By the time Gelsinger returned as Intel CEO in early 2021, members of Intel’s board were suggesting the company get out of the manufacturing business altogether and just focus on design, says Hutcheson. But Gelsinger was adamant: Intel needed to keep designing and making its own chips on a large scale, while also becoming more of a foundry that manufactures chips for Intel’s “fabless” competitors. In fact, he wanted Intel to become the second-largest foundry in the world by 2030. Gelsinger also set out to remake the company around a new and advanced manufacturing process called 18A, several generations beyond the complicated but low-yield process that got the company in trouble a decade ago.
To do all that, Gelsinger reckoned, he was going to need tens of billions of dollars from the federal government. So he appealed to the rising spirit of economic nationalism in Washington. Four months after he took over as CEO, he wrote an op-ed in Politico arguing that the US had an “urgent need for action to address national security.” He talked about “US chip leadership” and later even called Intel a “patriotic” company. (But only to a point, apparently. Gelsinger’s pitch to the Biden administration was simple: Subsidize US manufacturing or I’ll just build my fabs elsewhere.)
Gelsinger spent much of 2021 in meetings with officials in the US and Europe. In Washington, the CEO lobbied specifically for money to be aimed purely at US companies.
“God decided where the oil reserves are,” Gelsinger likes to say. “We can decide where the fab reserves are.” While Washington dragged its feet, Intel broke ground on two new fabs at its existing site in Arizona, ramped up operations at sites in New Mexico, went looking for new sites around the US, and eventually took Springowski up on her idea to build in Ohio.
The ultimate decision not to build in Lorain was about land. Intel officials said they needed close to 1,000 acres, shovel ready, and Lorain just didn’t have it. So Springowski put Intel in touch with folks who eventually reached out to JobsOhio, a privatized version of the state’s economic development agency. A second agency called One Columbus proposed a swath of farmland in New Albany, a small town outside of the capital that just so happened to be right next to a massive international business park. The deal involved buying out more than 50 landowners. Ohio came in with massive subsidies of its own—about $2 billion for infrastructure improvement, cost offsets, and income tax incentives.
When Intel announced it was coming to Ohio, in January 2022, it promised to invest an eventual $100 billion in the state and to build eight total fabs, which would make it one of the biggest microchip manufacturing sites in the world. That March, Gelsinger was a guest at the State of the Union address. For the Biden administration, it mattered that Intel was the only American company capable of making advanced semiconductors. And with Gelsinger at the helm, Hutcheson says, it looked like the company had a chance of making a comeback. President Biden called the Ohio site a “field of dreams” and urged Congress to pass the CHIPS Act—which it did in August 2022. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo started calling Intel “America’s champion semiconductor company.”
But the US government ultimately also hedged its bets—going against Gelsinger’s plea to invest only in American firms. It decided to subsidize other companies too. In March 2024, Intel was promised $8.5 billion in grants and $11 billion in loans—the largest amount assigned to a single company from the funds set aside by the CHIPS Act. Right behind it were Intel’s top competitors: TSMC was promised $6.6 billion in grants and $5 billion in loans to build fabs on US soil—its first one is set to come online next year, in Arizona—and Samsung got up to $6.4 billion in grants.
Then, the next month, long before any of those federal funds would actually show up in Intel’s bank accounts, the company revealed to investors that it was in trouble: It had lost $7 billion the year before, and another $1.6 billion the following quarter. The company’s stock price fell, hard—the largest decrease in half a century. Intel suspended dividends and announced it would lay off 15 percent of its staff, some 15,000 people.
Part of the trouble was that, like nearly every other tech company, Intel had overcommitted itself to rosy projections during the pandemic, when life seemed like it was going to move online forever. “None of us fully realized how much the industry was on the Covid sugar high,” says Gelsinger. But Intel’s fundamental problems run deep.
The national security stakes could not be higher. “If Intel’s not fixed,” Hutcheson says, we’re “hosed.”
I asked Gelsinger whether he regrets spending so much time pushing for government subsidies rather than focusing on Intel’s internal issues. He said the CHIPS Act would never have happened if he and others hadn’t seized the moment, and that he’s as confident as ever in his plan to remake Intel. “Of course I would have changed some of the tactics,” Gelsinger says. “But would I have changed the strategy? No.” Intel just needs to get through to the other side of a bad year, he says. “The new factories aren’t running yet. The new process technology isn’t there yet. The new products are just starting to ramp.”
Intel recently announced it had signed deals with Amazon and Microsoft to provide them with custom AI chips using the company’s new manufacturing process, and it was recently awarded a $3.5 billion contract to build chips for the Pentagon. Still, investors are questioning Gelsinger’s commitment to both design and build microchips; many argue the two parts of the company should be split apart. Bids to buy Intel outright have come in from much smaller companies, like Qualcomm. Practically every day brings another dismal headline in the tech press. In October, The New York Times reported that Commerce Secretary Raimondo has been actively trying to drum up new customers for Intel among the other US tech giants—with little success.
Hutcheson says it could be at least another year before we know whether Intel will be able to turn things around. He says he’s “very optimistic” about Intel’s new 18A chipmaking process. But the national security stakes could not be higher. “If Intel’s not fixed,” Hutcheson says, we’re “hosed.”
Whatever happens at Intel, there likely will be talk of a CHIPS Act 2. Congress of course will ask whether CHIPS Act 1 worked, says Chris Miller, author of the book Chip Wars. “But I think also Congress is going to look at the international environment,” he says: China is already at the equivalent of CHIPS Act 5 or 6—with an estimated $150 billion in subsidies so far, and it’s probably much more than that.
So for Miller, even if one or two CHIPS acts don’t lead to a healthy US-based semiconductor manufacturing industry led by Intel and others—if in fact this push for a national industrial policy dampens rather than promotes competition—it’s still a bet worth making, an insurance policy against a much bigger catastrophe if something goes wrong in the Taiwan Strait. If that happens, “the cost to the world economy will be measured in trillions of dollars of disruption to world manufacturing,” Miller says. “That’s not an overestimate. That’s the estimate.”
New Albany, Ohio, looks weirdly familiar, but I know I’ve never been here. Four decades ago, it was a tiny farm town about a 20-minute drive from Columbus. Back then, says the town’s mayor, Sloan Spalding, there was a dairy mart and a feed store. Then a wealthy man named Leslie Wexner started buying up land. “Like Walt Disney,” Spalding says.
Wexner is a billionaire many times over, the richest man in Ohio. He grew up in Dayton, the child of a Russian immigrant clothier. In 1963 he borrowed money from an aunt to start his own store called The Limited—basically inventing fast fashion. Then in 1982 Wexner bought a small lingerie business called Victoria’s Secret.
Wexner said his “mental model” for himself was Ralph Lauren, another son of immigrants who made his name selling an idyllic WASP fantasy. Wexner built his idea of Victoria’s Secret around a fictional character named Victoria Stuart-White. The address on an early catalog was No. 10 Margaret Street, London W1, but it was fake: The company was headquartered in Columbus.
“I built a business so I could create my own world,” Wexner said at the time. As Victoria’s Secret grew, he tried to remake downtown Columbus but was rebuffed by the city. So he turned to New Albany and built a 60,000-square-foot manor on a nearly 400-acre estate with horse barns, gardens, and tennis courts, along with a country club with a 27-hole golf course. From there he set out to develop an entire community with its own story—a place “where the enduring traditions of 19th-century towns create harmony between the buildings and the land,” according to the real estate development company Wexner helped form to build the town.
One of Wexner’s close partners in shaping New Albany was his financial manager and consigliere at the time, Jeffrey Epstein—who later became notorious for procuring women and children for sexual abuse and prostitution. Wexner, who says he cut ties with Epstein in 2007, has said he was unaware of any illegal activity.
Today, about 11,000 people live in New Albany, in large brick mini-mansions set back from the road. To drive around is to be tricked into thinking you are somewhere older but weirder than Ohio, or that you accidentally bought tickets to a Colonial Williamsburg where everyone wears polo shirts.
The high school looks like Monticello. There are white horse fences everywhere, making it seem like you’re always on the edge of a farm, even though you’re not. Things that look like barns are actually restaurants. “Retail nodes” are relegated to the outskirts—for unsightly things like gas stations and fast food. While New Albany’s 16 pages of design principles acknowledge that the Georgian style from 18th-century England never existed in Ohio, they suggest it should dominate the town’s architecture. All other designs “shall be based on American styles … excluding 20th century”—and, presumably, the 21st. “It’s timeless,” Mayor Spalding says. “I would say, very American.”
Adjacent to the town is the real driver of the whole enterprise—the New Albany International Business Park, home to Wexner-affiliated companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch and Bath & Body Works but also Discover Card, State Farm, American Electric Power, Aetna, data centers for Amazon, Google, and Meta—and, now, Intel.
You can see the cranes from a mile away. Intel calls it a “mega-site,” a footprint the size of two Disneylands. The Intel army won’t let me inside, but to drive around the perimeter of the Business Park takes an hour. The industrial park has its own landscaping and design standards too—think new berms and young trees to hide ugly or unfinished buildings.
To get to New Albany, the superload had to take the long way around, to avoid the overpasses and obstructions of Columbus. For a future delivery, the Intel army will team up with a local farm stand and chamber of commerce to stage an “Intel Superload Watch Party!!” as the convoy rolls past. For our delivery, most of the fanfare happens online. Matt Bruning from ODOT posts that the job is complete, then someone posts, “Moose, this bud’s for you,” and Moose responds with a “You’re killing me with kindness” meme.
At these Intel pop-ups, they like to display a wooden map of Ohio outlining all 88 counties—and use it to talk about how their project will benefit the entire state. The promise is 3,000 high-end jobs at the fabs, 7,000 construction jobs to build the fabs. JobsOhio predicts a multiplier effect of at least three times that for additional jobs. So far, Intel has reported filling 2,300 construction jobs and, since no fabs are up and running yet, fewer than 100 manufacturing jobs.
When I ask Kenny McDonald, head of the economic development agency One Columbus, whether he thinks the Intel project will help only the state’s wealthiest counties near Columbus or whether it will also help the poorer counties in southern and northeastern Ohio, he answers by telling me about how it will bring better competition across the Midwest. Henry Farrell, a political scientist and coauthor of the book Underground Empire, says projects like this one likely won’t make the US the manufacturing superpower it once was. Yet state and federal governments are still willing to make mass investments that “don’t have all that much direct impact on jobs,” because both political parties want to control the postindustrial Midwest.
Springowski says she just wants what’s fair for Lorain. Her city never really came out of the 2007 recession, she says, while Columbus and its surrounding areas are booming. She takes some consolation that Intel has committed to giving tens of millions to Ohio colleges and universities, including Lorain County Community College. She is still lobbying chipmakers—and Intel’s suppliers—to come to Lorain. And she’s still scouring the internet for information on how chips are made. These days she’s fascinated with how rare earth minerals get processed.
But the reason her town didn’t have land for Intel in the first place, she says, is that the mills and factories that came to Lorain a century ago are now empty and falling apart, some of them taking up hundreds of acres in the middle of town. “Why don’t we start taking these things down,” she asks, so there can be room to build what’s next?
(Update: On Joe Rogan’s podcast on October 25, Donald Trump badmouthed the CHIPS and Science Act, calling it “so bad” because it “put up billions of dollars for rich companies” instead of using tariffs to steer chipmaking to the US. The following week, House Speaker Mike Johnson said Republicans would “probably repeal” the act, but later walked back that comment and said the legislation “is not on the agenda for repeal.” Intel—whose stock went up by 12 percent in the days following Trump’s election as president—does not seem too concerned. While Intel hasn’t yet received all of the funding allocated to it by the CHIPS Act, a spokesperson for the company says that “the Commerce Department has publicly said that it wants to complete this process by the end of the year.”
Plus it’s reasonable to expect that the only US manufacturer of leading-edge chips could stand to benefit from an America-first administration that says it will impose tariffs on foreign goods. “The idea behind the CHIPS and Science Act began in the first Trump administration and maintains strong bipartisan support,” said Intel’s spokesperson. “We look forward to working with the Trump administration on this shared priority.”)
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