Albuquerque Intel Plant, New Mexico

One of Intel's seven large manufacturing locations in the country, and one of the largest single employers in the state, this plant employs around 6,000 people at its peak, making memory chips for computers. Located on a mesa above the Rio Grande in Rio Rancho, a few miles northwest of Albuquerque, the linear row of buildings, nearly a mile long, contain fabrication rooms as large as five football fields, where the air is changed at a rate of up to every ten seconds, and clean rooms so clean that no more than a single particle larger than half a micron exists in every cubic foot of air.