How a Factory Worker’s Cold Email Launched America’s $100 Billion Gamble on Intel and the Future of Chips
Mary Springowski has been fixated on microchips ever since a 2016 workplace accident upended her life. That year, a fully loaded parts cart at Ford’s northeastern Ohio plant slammed into her leg, severing her Achilles tendon and leaving her sidelined for weeks of recovery.
A 25-year veteran of Ford and the United Auto Workers, Springowski worked as a team leader at Cleveland Engine Plant, building four-cylinder engines for a range of vehicles. She also served on the city council in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio, a 65,000-person Lake Erie community roughly 25 miles west of Cleveland. Lorain was once a thriving manufacturing hub: home to shipyards, auto plants, steel forges, and bronze foundries. One local Ford facility built nearly 16 million vehicles—including Thunderbirds, Fairlanes, and Falcons—over five decades before closing in 2005. By the time of Springowski’s accident, Lorain’s decline was accelerating: one of the city’s two giant steel mills had just idled, and the other had laid off 800 workers, citing shifting global market trends. Lorain, Springowski says, was “not OK.”
Stuck on the couch with her leg elevated during recovery, Springowski spent hours online, brainstorming ways to fix her city’s problems. The EPA had recently ordered Lorain to complete tens of millions of dollars in repairs to its aging sewer system, and the city’s proposal to raise water rates had sparked widespread public anger. That debate got Springowski thinking about Lorain’s greatest underutilized asset: its location on Lake Erie, at the mouth of the major Black River tributary. She pulled up Google and searched: What industry uses the most water for production?
The answer came quickly: microchips. Springowski learned that chipmakers around the world were growing increasingly anxious about drought risks threatening their supply chains. She posted a Facebook note pointing out that Lorain had exactly what the semiconductor industry needed: “We have water! Lots of water!” From that moment, Springowski was convinced microchips would save Lorain, and she talked and posted about the idea nonstop for years. “That’s just how my mind works,” she told me.
It wasn’t until the massive global chip shortage that hit during the Covid-19 pandemic that people started to take her seriously. At Ford, Springowski’s assembly line was plagued with constant downtime. “We had engines that were just sitting,” she says—waiting to be installed in cars that couldn’t be finished without chips, while junior workers collected unemployment and struggled to afford gas for their own cars.
When Springowski learned the UAW was pushing for domestic chip production, she emailed union leaders and an Ohio congresswoman: “If you’re looking for places to build chip manufacturing, you need to look at Lorain.” She got no reply. Springowski refused to drop the issue. “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!!!!”
Eventually, Springowski decided to go straight to the source. She pulled up her old email to the UAW, rewrote it, and spent days researching every major chip company to track down executive contact information. She paid $3.99 on RocketReach to get the email address of Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel—one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers. On April 28, 2021, during another stretch of Ford plant downtime caused by missing parts, she hit send. Her email went to Gelsinger and the CEOs of roughly a dozen other chip companies, listing every reason Lorain was the perfect spot: abundant fresh water, access to a major port, interconnected highways and railways, and a local community college ready to train a new workforce.
She closed her pitch with her signature unapologetic 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 got a reply from Intel’s senior director of state government relations. He explained that Intel was actively scouting sites for a new network of chip fabs—Intel’s first major new U.S. manufacturing campus in decades. Ohio hadn’t even been on Intel’s shortlist before Springowski’s email landed. “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 so loud from the living room that her husband thought someone had gotten hurt.
“What?!” he yelled back from the kitchen.
“Intel wrote back!”
“No effing way!”
“Effing way.”
A Zoom call was arranged, and Springowski looped in Lorain Port and Finance Authority officials, then regional economic development teams. Eventually, she was in direct contact with Gelsinger himself.
What Springowski didn’t know at the time was that Gelsinger was in the middle of a massive campaign to convince Congress to heavily subsidize domestic chip manufacturing. For decades, cutting-edge chip production had shifted to Asia: Taiwan’s TSMC dominates the global market, followed by South Korea’s Samsung. This concentration became a pressing national security issue after Covid completely broke global chip supply chains, and rising tensions over Taiwan increased the risk of another catastrophic disruption.
Chips power every modern device: cars, phones, refrigerators, military weapons systems, and today, the core infrastructure of artificial intelligence. The U.S. now manufactures just 12% of the world’s chip supply, down from 37% in 1990. 70% of global production is now based in Asia.
Gelsinger argued to lawmakers that TSMC, Samsung, and Chinese chipmakers all receive massive government subsidies, so the U.S. needed to match that support to compete. Eight months after that first Zoom call with Springowski, in January 2022, Gelsinger announced Intel was bringing its massive new “Made in America” project—thousands of jobs, $28 billion in investment, the largest single private investment in Ohio history—to the state.
That summer, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, earmarking more than $52 billion in grants, loans, and incentives for domestic chip manufacturing. Intel received the largest single allocation: $8.5 billion in grants and $11 billion in loans. The legislation, first drafted during the Trump administration and signed into law by Joe Biden, is one of the few remaining examples of widespread bipartisan agreement on creating U.S. jobs and countering China’s tech expansion.
But Intel carries enormous baggage. The company dominated the tech era when Windows PCs were the center of the tech world, but a string of crippling strategic missteps left it locked out of the next great markets: smartphone processors, and now artificial intelligence. Today, as the U.S. anoints Intel its national champion in the global chip arms race, the consequences of those old mistakes are coming to a head. Over the past year, Intel’s stock price has plummeted, the company has laid off 15,000 workers, launched a massive restructuring, and rumors swirl that it could be broken up or 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 core questions now are: can Gelsinger pull off a comeback before Intel collapses? And what happens to the communities counting on Intel to revive their local economies?
For Springowski, the news that Intel was coming to Ohio was bittersweet: she had successfully drawn the company to her state, but not to her hometown of Lorain. After evaluating options, Intel selected a huge plot of farmland in New Albany, a small town outside the state capital of Columbus.
Building a cutting-edge microchip fabrication facility (or fab) is an almost unimaginably complex project, requiring infrastructure and specialized equipment on a scale comparable to building the pyramids—all to mass produce components measured in nanometers. Over the next several years, all that massive construction is converging on those central Ohio farm fields. While the New Albany site has many advantages, it lacks Lorain’s direct port access; the nearest commercial port is 140 miles away. That means every oversized piece of equipment for the fabs has to crawl slowly across half the state to reach its destination.
It’s an early summer morning in 2024, hours before dawn and hours before the Ohio heat becomes oppressive. I’m standing in southern Ohio near Portsmouth, 200 miles south of Lorain, on a floodplain above a bend in the Ohio River, in a gas station parking lot across from a restaurant called Mex-Itali (“The Best of Both Worlds!”). Around two dozen workers—all men—mill about, pulling on hard hats and yellow safety vests, sipping coffee and smoking. One goes by the nickname Moose.
We’re gathered here because 100 feet away, two two-lane roads meet at a 90-degree intersection. This would be unremarkable on any other day, but in an hour, an enormous load—so big it’s hard to process its size, sitting on 172 wheels—will rumble up to make the turn.
The crew in the parking lot is going over how the turn will be executed. Moose runs a quick safety briefing, reminds everyone to stay hydrated, and reminds them to keep radio communication clear and professional.
It took almost two years of planning to get to this moment. This is the 13th of roughly two dozen “superloads”—highway cargo weighing more than 120,000 pounds—being transported across Ohio for Intel. This specific load is 280 feet long, 23 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and weighs nearly 1 million pounds. It’s a critical piece of factory equipment called a cold box, a boring name for something so massive. It was built in Europe, shipped to New Orleans, barged up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, unloaded at a custom-built port near Portsmouth, and now needs to travel overland to the Intel site, which is planned to eventually become one of the largest AI chip production hubs in the world.
Moving this single load takes seven days, a fleet of trucks, dozens of permits, a whole crew of workers from utility companies, hauling firms, plus local police and highway patrol. Along the entire route, crews have to temporarily move power lines and traffic lights just to let the load pass. Because the transport disrupts local traffic so much, the largest superloads have to be delivered before the school year starts.
A cold box is part of an air separation unit, critical for chip manufacturing. Fabs need completely sterile cleanrooms—even a microscopic speck of dust can destroy an entire silicon wafer. Air separation pulls apart atmospheric gases, using nitrogen to purge all moisture, particles, and other contaminants from supplies and tools. Four of these cold boxes will eventually be erected vertically like small skyscrapers at Intel's 1,000-acre New Albany site.
Locals have become casual superload fans, following updates from the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) on Facebook. Comments range from supportive (one woman offered the crew homemade blackberry cobbler) to annoyed at traffic delays, to fascinated by the logistics of moving something so big. Many turn out to watch the convoy pass.
Emily Stone brought a camp chair. Her friends call her the “Load Chaser,” and this is her second superload. “Small town America—this stuff doesn’t happen,” she says. Born and raised in Portsmouth, she’s watched the town’s industrial base die off: once it had shoe factories, a steel mill, a brickyard, and a nearby uranium enrichment plant for nuclear weapons, the cutting-edge superpower technology of the mid-20th century. Stone’s dad worked there for 35 years, and died of leukemia after the plant stopped enrichment in 2001. A local middle school later closed after radioactive contamination was found, and Stone has spent years protesting the plant operator’s refusal to take public responsibility.
After Portsmouth’s industries collapsed, it became a frontline community in the opioid epidemic. At one point, it had the highest number of pill mills per capita in the U.S., and was the central setting for Dreamland, the landmark book about the crisis. In the early 2000s, OxyContin was effectively used as local currency—one resident told the author she bought a car with pills. Stone, who worked as a pharmacy tech at the time, saw both people who profited and people who died from the crisis.
For Stone, the superload is a fun distraction, but she understands why many locals are skeptical, even hostile, as the massive load makes its way from one of Ohio’s poorest regions to one of its wealthiest. “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?” one local asked on Facebook.
“I’m just disgusted by the whole darn thing,” another posted. “Big business tends to trample on everyone, at every turn, while brainwashing folks into thinking they are doing favors for us.”
“They don’t benefit anyone in southern Ohio at all,” another commented.
We hear the superload before we see it: a low, deep hum rolling from the west. It’s a giant white box longer than the fuselage of a Boeing 747. It takes two semi-trucks to move it: one pulling from the front, one pushing from the back, with a third on standby just to help it up hills. Two workers stand on a small platform at the back of the load, manning a special steering console that helps guide the cold box through tight turns.
I climb into an ODOT vehicle with spokesman Matt Bruning, a former news radio reporter who tells me AI now does voice ad work at one of his old stations. Bruning and Moose have become minor Facebook celebrities for their work on the superload project. “Super Load #13 is making the turn,” Bruning posts, and we cruise ahead of the convoy, heading north into Ohio.
Intel encouraged me to come along on the trip; it was their idea that I shadow the superload. The company has deployed a small, enthusiastic team in branded T-shirts to build excitement in towns along the route, defuse anger from traffic jams, and share fun facts about the project. They set up Intel tents, hand out noisemakers and branded toys to kids, set up booths next to food trucks, and let people try VR headsets that show what a fab looks like: engineers in full-body cleanroom “bunny suits” walking through a sterile room full of multi-million dollar equipment.
By mid-morning, the heat has become oppressive, and we haven’t even left Portsmouth yet. The superload averages just 6 miles per hour, and then a belt snaps in the steering console’s engine. The whole convoy stops while the crew fixes the issue.
Locals come out on their porches to watch crews in bucket trucks loosen the cantilevered arms that hold stoplights over the intersection; when the load passes, they’ll swing the arms out of the way, then swing them back. A group of spectators watches from outside a drug rehab center—these days, Portsmouth is known as much for addiction treatment and recovery as it is for the opioid crisis. After the worst of the epidemic, the town has worked to rebuild itself, which Dreamland author Sam Quinones highlighted in a later updated chapter of the book.
Bruning suggests we wait in the air-conditioned car, but we notice we’re stopped near a classic old ice cream shop called Malt Shops that advertises “Ice Cream, Shakes, Sundaes, Sandwiches, and Footers.” A group of crew members, Intel staff, and I go in and order a little of everything.
The crew comes from all over the country. Joe Jones and his team drove down from Detroit. He used to work for a Ford parts supplier. Before Covid, he says, auto work was steady. After the chip shortage, “too much stress.” Modern Ford vehicles are full of chips—hundreds, even thousands per car, he says, and the company can even remotely deactivate a car if a buyer misses a payment. “Chips are what the next war’s gonna be about,” he says. Now he works for his cousin’s utility company, helping move power lines out of the way for superloads.
Rick and Julia Miller are from northern Florida. Rick used to supervise roofing crews and got laid off during Covid; Julia raised specialty chickens that laid dark mahogany brown eggs. A friend told them they could travel the country and make good money as pilot car drivers for oversized loads. Now in their 70s, they lead the superload convoy in a truck with orange flags and a big yellow “OVERSIZE LOAD” sign.
Danny Hoeck is from central Kentucky, and 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 drivers qualified to do this kind of work.
Then there’s Moose—full name Kieran Drylie, from New Jersey, a big guy with a knack for viral social media memes. We hear over the radio that the steering console is fixed, and we watch the superload inch up the road toward the Malt Shops. Moose’s boss later tells me that instead of taking apart the engine to replace the broken belt, the crew just swapped in a whole new engine to get moving again.
Pat Gelsinger came back to Intel to fix exactly this kind of mess.
He started working at Intel when he was just 18, back when the company was the beating heart of the global tech industry. Moore’s Law—the prediction that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years without raising costs—was coined by his boss, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore. Intel invented the first commercial microprocessor and turned Silicon Valley from a fruit-growing region into the global tech capital. It was one of the most powerful companies in the world.
Gelsinger rose through the ranks: he was the chief architect of the first processor with more than a million transistors. But by the time he left the company in 2009—when he was pushed out as chief technology officer, as he puts it—Intel was already veering off course.
Intel was still raking in massive profits from PC chips, but in 2006, then-CEO Paul Otellini turned down a deal with Steve Jobs to build chips for a new Apple device. He thought sales would be too low. That device was the iPhone. After that, the entire smartphone industry adopted a chip standard that didn’t belong to Intel.
A few years later, AI researchers started training neural networks—long written off as a dead end—using a chip