Intel turned to longtime partners Jacobs Engineering Group to design the project and Hoffman Construction to build it. Already tasked with working on another massive Intel fab plant in Israel, the firms had to pivot when Intel dramatically accelerated the timeline for the Arizona fab plant.

Fortunately, Jacobs already had a sizable team on Fab 52, who could convert much of the in-progress designs for the Israel plant and apply design automation routines to handle tasks like adapting to U.S. code compliance, which quickly “increased the velocity of design,” says Adam Youngbar, senior vice president and general manager of Jacobs’ electronics business.

Photo courtesy Hoffman Construction

Concurrently, Hoffman began rough excavation based on preliminary plans and refined the pit dimensions as the design progressed. “We were feeding the information minute by minute to the construction team out in the field so we could stay ahead of what we needed to do,” says Nathan Moroney, Hoffman executive vice president. All told, the project moved 880,000 cu yd of earth.

Concrete foundation work followed a couple of months after the reprioritization. Meanwhile, Jacobs raced ahead on the 200+ Revit and CAD models using a “production system design in collaboration with Intel to shorten our design cycles and reduce the amount of change in this project,” says Youngbar. Key decisions about space planning were made early in the design process, and piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) designs were locked in early as well. This allowed construction documents to continually flow to “feed the machine” of work at the site, he adds. In total, 408 miles of piping were modeled in 3D for the project.

Photo courtesy Hoffman Construction

In the four-level plant (see graphic), the main fabrication space occupies two levels: the ultra-cleanroom housing the manufacturing “tools” sits above a subfab level equipped with thousands of pumps, transformers and other process systems that support the tools above. The 42-in.-thick, cast-in-place concrete floor system between these two levels needed to provide extreme vibration control and accommodate thousands of 14-in.-dia openings for airflow, MEP and process piping. “The penetrations had to perfectly match the design and engineering models dimensionally and geometrically, because the final tool distribution piping was built off-site during construction to the same dimensions,” according to the project team. To execute these precise slab penetrations, the team developed a concrete form system consisting of a grid of circular-shaped penetrations (cans) in the slab, which, once finished, was likened to Swiss cheese.

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Hoffman regularly employs offsite manufacturing (OSM) on its projects, but stepped up the deployment dramatically for Fab 52. For the “cheese” slab, the forming system was assembled, aligned and prepared off-site, along with rebar assemblies prefabricated to exact standards. Crews used custom picking devices to position the form modules and rebar cages in a specific configuration.

In total, more than 440,000 cu yd of concrete was placed.

Photo courtesy Hoffman Construction

Many other project components underwent multiple levels of OSM before the final install to optimize shipping and assembly. For a 1.5-mi-long trestle system—up to six stories in height—that connects the new plant to other campus facilities, around 800 smaller modules arrived on site from three different states, then assembled locally into ever larger modules until final placement, says Intel’s Construction VP Ward.

“What that allows is for us to not ship air — it allows us to ship all these systems economically in a smart way,” Moroney adds.

Hoffman also used OSM vertically, preassembling decking, conduit, cable trays, piping, and other systems at ground level into ever larger, longer configurations. “That allows you to work down at lower elevations, be more efficient, be safer, and then you lift it into place, bolt it off and connect it,” Moroney says. The method requires intensive coordination with the design process to execute properly, he adds.

More than 30,000 craftworkers cycled on and off the project, maintaining an exemplary safety record during 35+ million hours.
Photo by Diego Diaz, courtesy Hoffman

At peak, the site’s skyline was crested with 55 cranes, including the world’s largest crawler crane, a Liebherr LR 13000 provided by Buckner HeavyLift Cranes. Nicknamed ‘Skyreacher’ by a local elementary school, the crane placed dozens of roof trusses, each as long as 168 ft and weighing up to 240 tons: 35,000 tons of steel form the structure.

At its peak, the site bustled with activity from 7,000 craft workers and another 3,000 technicians installing specialized manufacturing tools. “We onboarded more than 31,000 craft workers to maintain headcount” during the 3.5-year-long construction cycle, says the team. Around one-fifth of the workers didn’t speak English, so the team implemented weekly bilingual mass safety meetings, a Spanish-language contractor orientation and Spanish project signage.

Safety orientations also highlighted that “we want people to feel psychologically safe so they can talk about anything that’s unsafe on the job or something that needs to be addressed,” says Moroney. Hoffman’s Get Us There Safely (GUTS) program also included GUTS rooms: dedicated spaces where “anyone on the job site can go and have a safe place” to let off steam, have a private conversation or handle personal business, he adds. “Really, it’s a space for mental health, because we recognize that’s what people need on these job sites.”

Ward also brought safety expertise from his manufacturing industry experience to the construction site, performing weekly safety walks alongside Hoffman to provide a “factory manager safety lens,” he says.

Over more than 35 million worker hours, the team had an incident rate of just 0.55 and a lost-time rate of only 0.07.

"Safety isn’t just a priority—it’s a core value that drives every decision, every action, and every project Hoffman undertakes," says John. R. Cooper Jr., who served as site safety manager for Maxim Crane Works L.P. "In complex, high-risk environments, their unwavering commitment to safety sets a benchmark the entire construction industry strives to meet."

To fabricate transistors the size of just a few atoms, Intel required a cleanroom the size of four soccer fields, an ultra-pure water and wastewater facilities, air separation units, chiller plants and power substation.
Photo courtesy Hoffman Construction

Good Steward

Click the image to see the entirety of the infographic.
Graphic courtesy Intel

Construction also included a first-of-its-kind ultra-pure water facility, a wastewater treatment plant, air separation units to produce nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen for on-site use, and a new substation to upgrade the power delivery to the campus from a 69 kV feed to 230 kV. The ancillary systems all align with Intel’s overall corporate net-positive water and renewable energy goals by 2030.

Fab 52 got its nickname ‘Project Eagle’ when a pair of bald eagles nested adjacent to the site on Gila River Indian Community land. The project team collaborated with local officials to establish strict non-disturbance rules and work radii to minimize noise and protect the nests, which ultimately led to four eaglets successfully fledging during the project.

For Ward, who moved from fab operations to construction specifically to help execute Fab 52, the Herculean effort carries much greater significance than his or the vast team’s personal satisfaction. The project “was a chance to be a part of building a facility that’s on the leading edge of what mankind can provide.”