SAN FRANCISCO — Intel, the world’s largest computer chip manufacturer, will invest $7 billion to build a new factory in Arizona, the company’s chief executive said Wednesday after meeting with President Donald Trump in the White House.
The factory, which will complement two other factories that Intel has in Chandler, Ariz., has been under consideration for several years. But Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that the tax cuts and deregulatory policies pushed by Mr. Trump had prompted the company to move forward with its plans.
“The people of Arizona will be very happy. It’s a lot of jobs,” Mr. Trump said at a White House event to announce the expansion.
The new facility will build a new generation of chips with ultra-small circuitry and employ 3,000 additional people at its peak and indirectly create 10,000 jobs in the Arizona area in support of the factory, Intel said.
“This factory will produce the most powerful computer chips on the planet,” Mr. Krzanich said.
Although the company is based in California’s Silicon Valley, the majority of its global chip production is in Oregon and Arizona. It also has factories in other countries, including China and Israel.
Mr. Trump was the second president to celebrate the computer chip maker’s attempts to expand its domestic production at the same facility in Chandler.
In 2012, then-President Barack Obama went to the factory’s construction site and celebrated that the plant would produce “some of the fastest and most powerful computer chips on Earth.”
“Let’s stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas,” Mr. Obama said at the time. “Let’s reward companies like Intel that are investing and creating jobs right here in the United States of America.”
The announcement comes as Intel has shed jobs.
It announced last year that it planned to lay off 12,000 workers in a reorganization prompted by a decline in sales of personal computers. That was about 11 percent of the company’s workers.
Since Mr. Trump’s election victory, numerous companies have announced plans to create or retain jobs in the U.S. Yet some analysts have said that many of those plans were in the works before the election or had come at significant cost to taxpayers.
In November, air-conditioning company Carrier announced that it would keep hundreds of factory jobs in the U.S. that were slated to move to Mexico. While Mr. Trump celebrated the announcement as a win, later reporting revealed that Indiana had agreed to give the company up to $7 million in tax credits.
In December, when Japanese corporate giant SoftBank said that it would invest $50 billion and create 50,000 jobs, analysts said that those funds probably would have been destined for the U.S. anyway.
The Washington Post and The Associated Press contributed.