The leak of two weeks ago about the movements of the blue giant in Russian territory has been fulfilled and apparently they are going to go a little further than expected, since the official decision and now taken will affect everything that Intel has in Russian and even Belarusian territory. Therefore, Intel is suspending all business (including processors and graphics) with Russia and Belarus effective immediately.
It has been in an official company statement where Intel has captured the new scenario that Russia and the employees who work there are going to find, since the war against Ukraine does not seem to be near its end and therefore the measures taken have been the toughest possible to show their discomfort, which is going to do a lot of damage to these two countries.
Russia says goodbye to Intel processors and ASICs
The precedent we saw two weeks ago was just the tip of the iceberg, since on that occasion Intel decided to suspend CPU shipments to Russia, a harsh measure that is now much more enhanced when we read the company’s official statement:
“Effective immediately, we have suspended all business operations in Russia. This follows our earlier decision to suspend all shipments to customers in Russia and Belarus. […] We are working to support all our employees in this difficult situation, including our 1,200 employees in Russia. We have also implemented business continuity measures to minimize disruption to our global operations.”
And it is that Intel not only had to its credit the trade of processors in Russian territory, in fact, this is only part of the cake while the rest of it was focused on the development of software for the company.
This reaches the point that in the last 30 years Intel has gradually increased its deployment in Russian territory to the aforementioned 1,200 employees, most of whom are in a software development center in Nizhny Novgorod, where they are responsible for the new tools called oneAPI and OpenVINO, as well as vTune profiler and Parallel Studio.
Relocation of employees and logistical problems for Russia
Intel does not want to lose the Russian talent that it has on the payroll and it seems that it will propose that its employees be transferred to other company headquarters to keep their jobs and be able to continue with the important software development that they have been doing.
The problem logically now lies with Russia and Belarus, since if we take into account that they are going to run out of desktop and server processors, that companies like Dell, HP or Lenovo have stopped operating and that Russian Elbrus CPUs are not at the height, then there is only one path left for them to follow.
And this path is nothing more than opting for China and its hardware, which is also not up to AMD or Intel and, furthermore, it is not at all clear that the Asian country wants to supply technology to Russia. The situation is not critical, but in 12 or 18 months it could be, since the main banks and companies in the country are going to need servers and equipment in no time and what is in stock is running out at a rate higher than expected after the first announcement from Intel. What will Russia do in the face of this problem?
