Bechtel, a long-time leader in engineering, construction, and project management for things like nuclear reactors and liquefied natural gas facilities, made big news in the semiconductor industry in 2022 with the announcement that it would be the project delivery provider for Intel’s greenfield fab campus project in Ohio.
“Intel has chosen Bechtel to deliver our largest construction project to date,” said Jackie Sturm corporate vice president, Global Supply Chain Operations at Intel. “Bechtel has decades of world class expertise in complex global construction projects, leveraging a deeply experienced team, critical craft support and robust analytics platforms. Their relentless focus on safety, quality and innovation aligns with Intel key values.”
Catherine Hunt Ryan, president of Bechtel’s Manufacturing & Technology business, said: “A project of this complexity and magnitude—with an outsized impact on the community and economy—is the type of work Bechtel is uniquely positioned to deliver. We are honored to be chosen by Intel as its partner and we are ready to build their most advanced semiconductor facilities in the world.”
Earlier in 2022, Bechtel announced its Manufacturing & Technology business unit to address growing customer and market demands for engineering, procurement, and construction services for semiconductor, electric vehicle, and data center sectors. Hunt Ryan is the president of the business, having previously served as Bechtel’s CFO, and continues to serve on the company’s Board of Directors.
Through this new business, Bechtel provides engineering, procurement and construction, or EPC, services designed specifically for the semiconductor industry. The company conducts supply chain assessments, preliminary front-end engineering design (pre-FEED) studies, detailed engineering services, procurement, construction execution, and commissioning.
Bechtel also provides in-depth digital services. We recently caught up with Dr. Evann Smith, the digital solutions manager for Bechtel’s Manufacturing & Technology business unit where they lead the strategic development and deployment of the digital ecosystem “that is inclusive of our data architecture, our data engineering, our data integration, and our analytics and data science, including AI and machine learning,” they said.
Smith said Bechtel is currently working with a semiconductor customer to develop their next evolution of digital integration for project engineering and construction. “We are helping them build out their digital solutions framework, their environment and their integrations, so that they can best leverage all of the data that is generated throughout project execution and into operations,” Smith said. “That is part of the value-add that we bring to the semiconductor industry. We’re building digital capabilities, workflows and integrations to establish the foundation for digital design for the next decade plus.”
Smith said digital integration and data intelligence is particularly critical in the semiconductor industry now, more so than ever before. “It has to do with the scale and the complexity of the projects that we’re seeing come online and that we’re working on right now,” they said, noting that over $100 billion in construction spending is forecasted to occur over the next five years. “It’s not just more and more projects and more and more money; each of these projects is becoming increasingly bigger and more complex. I would argue that the increasing scale and complexity of these projects is fundamentally driving the imperative of digital integration. We need consistent, integrated, real time and transparent execution of these projects for our EPCs and for our owner operators,” Smith said.
Smith said there’s an incredible opportunity for repeatability in fab construction. “The goal would be that — if you have that digitally integrated environment and data transparency — to carry that intelligence from mod to mod to mod.” Smith expects it could result in time schedule and efficiency gains similar to what Bechtel has experienced in the liquified natural gas industry (where we’ve seen gains approaching 40%).
At SEMICON West this year, Smith was a panelist on the CXO Panel “Can AI/GenAI + Digital Twin Make Semiconductor Factory Construction Smarter?”