In April, Intel attempted to announce layoffs without announcing layoffs. “We have not set any headcount reduction target,” Intel spokesperson Sophie Metzger told The Verge. But the company has laid off thousands of employees since — and today, in the company’s Q2 2025 earnings, it has revealed that Intel will dramatically shrink as a result of those layoffs. Intel says it will retreat from planned projects in Germany and Poland, end its assembly and test operations in Costa Rica, and finish 2025 with just around 75,000 “core employees” in total.
Intel employed 109,800 people at the end of 2024, of which 99,500 were “core employees,” so the company is pushing out around 24,000 people this year — shrinking the entire company by roughly one-quarter. (It has also divested other businesses, shrinking the larger organization as well.)
Intel has had a presence in Poland since 1993, however, and the company did not say its R&D facilities there are closing. (Intel had previously pressed pause on the new Germany and Poland projects “by approximately two years” back in 2024.)
In Costa Rica, where Intel employs over 3,400 people, the company will “consolidate its assembly and test operations in Costa Rica into its larger sites in Vietnam.” Intel spokesperson Sophie Metzger tells The Verge that over 2,000 Costa Rica employees will remain to work in engineering and corporate, though.
The company is also cutting back in Ohio: “Intel will further slow the pace of construction in Ohio to ensure spending is aligned with market demand.”
It’s not clear if the layoffs will slow now that we’re over halfway through the year, but Intel states today that it has already “completed the majority of the planned headcount actions it announced last quarter to reduce its core workforce by approximately 15 percent.”
So far, partially because of the $1.9 billion that Intel is incurring to do these layoffs and this restructuring, Intel is still losing money this quarter. It’s reporting a $2.9 billion loss on $12.9 billion in quarterly revenue (which is itself flat year over year). Amidst the ongoing AI boom, Intel’s data center business is only up 4 percent year-over-year to $3.9 billion, while its PC chips are down 3 percent to $7.9 billion. Intel’s foundry business where it does chipmaking for other customers is up 3 percent to $4.4 billion.
The company says it’s on track to shrink its expenses by $17 billion over the full year, and that at least one of its next flagship laptop chips is on track, too: “The first Panther Lake processor SKU remains on track to begin shipping later this year, with additional SKUs coming in the first half of 2026.”
Developing…we’re listening to Intel’s earnings call and will add to this story if we hear anything intriguing.
