At the IFS Direct Connect 2024 event, the CEO of Intel, Pat Gelsinger, revealed that the company’s semiconductor manufacturing arm, Intel Foundry Services (IFS), is open to making chips for every brand, even for companies that compete directly with Intel in the PC and laptop chip space, including AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm.
Paul Alcorn from Tom's Hardware asked Pat “Intel will now offer its process nodes to some of its competitors, and there may be situations wherein your product teams are competing directly with competitors that are enabled by your crown jewels. How do you plan to navigate those types of situations and maybe soothe ruffled feathers on your product teams?” Answering that question, Pat gave the following statement:
“Well, if you go back to the picture I showed today, Paul, there are Intel products and Intel foundry, There's a clean line between those, and as I said on the last earnings call, we'll have a setup separate legal entity for Intel foundry this year. We'll start posting separate financials associated with that going forward. And the foundry team's objective is simple: Fill. The. Fabs. Deliver to the broadest set of customers on the planet.”
“We hope that that includes Jensen (Nvidia), Christiano (Qualcomm), and Sundar (Google), and you heard today it includes Satya (Microsoft), and I even hope that includes Lisa (AMD) going forward. I mean, we want to be the foundry for the world, and if we're going to be the Western foundry at scale, we can't be discriminating about who’s participating in that. So, unequivocally, it is to be the foundry for the world. Commit supply chains, your leadership technology – the doors to the ala carte menu are wide open for the industry.”
While those statements make it clear that IFS will not hesitate to make chips for Intel's direct competitors, Pat further reiterated the company’s approach on the matter saying “So I want my foundry to be used by everybody. Period. We want to help build Nvidia chips, and AMD chips, and TPU chips for Google, and inference chips for Amazon. Period. We want to help them and give them the most powerful, performant, and efficient technologies for them to build their systems. Period. Full stop.”
Intel’s plan to make chips for these companies will certainly affect other semiconductor manufacturing companies, including Samsung Foundry and TSMC in a huge way, especially when you consider that IFS has the technology to build chips on 2nm and even 1.8nm fabrication process (Intel 20A and Intel 18A).
