Several weeks after announcing that it was no longer selling its products in the country, Intel has officially announced that it is discontinuingat least temporarily, all its operations in Russia, in response to the invasion of Ukraine. The company, yes, will continue to support its employees in Russia, which currently number 1,200, but will not continue with its activities there, after suspending all shipments to its customers in Russia and Belarus.
The company assures that they have also implemented various continuity measures to minimize the problems and inconveniences that this decision may cause in other countries where Intel does have a presence. Thus ceases the presence of one of the first companies to open an office in the country after the fall of the USSR. It did so at the end of 1991, and from then until now it has made heavy investments in the area, in addition to establishing research and development centers, such as the one in Nizhny Novgorod, which will now stop their activity, without knowing when they will resume it again. , or if they will do it again at some point.
It’s also unclear what Intel means by providing support to its employees. Is may decide to move some of them to other countries so that they can continue their work on various projects of relevance to the company. It would not be exactly the only technology company to do so, since not a few technology companies have transferred their employees, and sometimes also their families, outside of Russia, if they wished.
The total exit of Intel from Russia, as well as that of other technology companies such as Dell, HPE or Lenovo, will mean that many companies will soon run out of chips or equipment to continue operating, which will mean that they will have to reduce their operations. There are chips developed in Russia, such as the Elbrus, but they do not reach the level of those made by Intel or AMD in terms of performance. Meanwhile, it is estimated that Yandex, one of the main Russian technology companies, will run out of the necessary chips for its servers to work in 12 or 18 months, due to the restrictions imposed on imports.
Russia, at least for now, has the advantage of using processors and accelerators developed in China, but this can cause many problems, not the least of which is lack of familiarity with them. Because Chinese companies may decide not to risk supplying hardware to Russia in order not to get into more trouble with the United States, since for the production of chips they use mostly American technology, and the United States has already prohibited its technology from being exported to Russia. .
