An IT manager at Intel Corp. says that the company wants to run its data centers “like an Intel factory,” a strategy that includes a plan to consolidate 133 existing IT facilities into eight data center hubs.

Intel currently has about 93,000 servers — more than one for every employee. And many of them are based on single-core processors, according to Brently Davis, manager of the company’s data center efficiency initiative.

Davis outlined Intel’s data center consolidation strategy in a short blog posting and an accompanying video in which he responded to questions asked by someone who was outside of the camera’s view. In response to some of the answers, the person asking the questions sprinkled in a couple of superlatives, such as, “Wow, that’s amazing.”

“Like most other companies these days, Intel is facing a growing demand for computing resources,” Davis wrote in his blog posting. “As a result, our computing costs are going up along with that demand. All of these issues prompted us to take a hard look at our data center strategy to see where we could make it more efficient.”

As part of the consolidation effort, Intel wants to increasingly move to servers with multicore processors as well as server virtualization software, Davis said in the video. Instead of running one operating system per server, the company wants to put four operating systems on individual machines, he added.

Davis said the consolidation moves may result in as much as $1.8 billion in cost savings for Intel over the next seven years. It is expected to take that long to fully implement the efficiency program, he said, although he added that the company hopes to accelerate the process and complete the work by 2010 or 2011.

Data center consolidation has become a mainstream trend within IT departments, including the ones at major technology vendors. For instance, Hewlett-Packard Co. has been reducing 85 data centers located worldwide into six major facilities, all in the U.S., under a consolidation plan announced two years ago.