To maintain the world's leading position in the semiconductor industry, the capital and technical requirements are becoming more and more extreme. In this regard, the "Financial Times" analyzed the situation of Intel.

The extent of its extremes is evident from the two announcements Intel made this week. The two announcements show that Intel is profoundly changing the way it traditionally does business, trying to regain lost technological edge and ensure that the United States has at least one of the world's leading chipmakers.

The first announcement was that the company would sell a 49% stake in two new manufacturing plants being developed in Arizona to private equity firm Brookfield. With the cost of building state-of-the-art factories soaring, it's a whole new way to finance chip fabrication plants (wafer production). The Brookfield deal covers an initial $30 billion investment in Arizona, while Intel is placing long-term investments in new fabs, such as the one Intel is building in Germany, each costing more than $100 billion.

The deal is a windfall of Intel's decision to gain a foothold in chip manufacturing, even as Intel struggles to regain its supremacy in the latest process technology, with their foundry lagging behind TSMC and Samsung.

Most other chipmakers have chosen a different path. Its rival AMD abandoned manufacturing a decade ago to focus on design. The decision to specialize (while outsourcing manufacturing) is starting to pay off as AMD's latest designs erode Intel's market dominance of the x86 chips used in most PCs and servers.

The size of the latest chip fab could outstrip the needs of Intel's in-house chip design business. That means going into the foundry market and making chips for other companies to absorb the extra capacity.

The resulting capital intensity is incredible. Intel's capital spending has averaged around 20% of its revenue annually over the past decade. The company forecasts that figure will rise to 25% in the future - and that doesn't include new sources of funding such as government grants and co-investment arrangements such as the Brookfield deal. All told, Intel said this could push capital expenditures closer to more than 35% of annual sales.

Exactly the proportion of risk and reward of the new financing arrangement has not been disclosed. But Intel has hinted that it has offered some protections, such as guarantees that Brookfield has a certain level of production at its new fab, and said the investment firm would receive a relatively fixed return on its 49% stake, subject to some variations. Financing costs are higher than direct borrowing arrangements in return for financing costs. Intel believes that if the factory does well, it will have a chance to rise, which means it also faces most of the risk if the factory does not perform well.

The second sign of a sea change in Intel's business model came a day earlier, when CEO Pat Kirsinger showed off some of the company's new chip designs. These chips are not based on a single silicon chip, and the company is moving toward chips that combine multiple components, or "chiplets," into a single semiconductor.

One advantage of this so-called "decentralized" chip design is that Intel doesn't need to manufacture all the parts itself. So if Intel can't get back to the lead in manufacturing technology, it may buy individual components from other companies that it can't manufacture itself. Producing other components can still keep its new chip fab going.

That could hurt profit margins because Intel doesn't make the most advanced components in its own chip foundries. On the other hand, designing and integrating these new processors may provide some margin protection and will increase the value of the chip packaging technology it has developed.

Regardless of the outcome, developments this week suggest that as new fabs come online and new generations of chips are developed, a complex and technically challenging new business model could take years to materialize. It will also require a cultural transformation, as a company known for being a highly closed culture learns how to open up its technology to other companies, while also working to develop the new sense of service required for a successful foundry business.

To make matters worse, Intel is struggling to make this transition in the face of declining market share and slumping demand for its chips. Its shares have halved after Kirsinger's brief slack in office, and its stock market value trailed AMD's last month. The new Intel may already be taking shape, but there is still a long way to go.