Yesterday, we reported on the Intel Foundry Direct Connect 2024 conference, where the CEO of the blue team put on a show. In addition to reaffirmed ambitions and a crazy pace, a few other thunderous announcements were made. In his race to turn Intel into a foundry capable of competing with TSMC, Pat Gelsinger has just announced two huge victories: AMAZON and MICROSOFT. It’s clear, then, that despite the ups and downs, Intel’s strategy is beginning to materialize. Three major customers have just left TSMC to join Intel and benefit from its 18A process: ARM, AMAZON and MICROSOFT.
As far as the latter is concerned, it’s difficult to know what uses the future chips designed by Microsoft and produced by Intel will be put to. The presence of the OpenAI boss at the conference may suggest that the aim is to break away from Nvidia as quickly as possible, but we can’t rule out a specific chip for products in the Surface range either.
Satya Nadella’s statement seems to confirm that Microsoft has already been working on the subject for some time, and that its teams have been able to evaluate the 18A:
“We are in the midst of a very exciting platform shift that will fundamentally transform the productivity of every individual organization and the industry as a whole. To realize this vision, we need a reliable supply of the most advanced, highest-performance, high-quality semiconductors … That’s why we’re so excited to be working with Intel Foundry, and why we’ve chosen a chip design that we plan to develop and produce on the Intel 18A process.”
If Intel can put pressure on TSMC or Encore Nvidia, the whole market will benefit. Equipping computer centers for AI is a major financial challenge and a real goldmine, as we’ve seen for Nvidia. However, we know that processing and accelerating AI on our PCs and not in the cloud is a major issue. This is undoubtedly the direction in which the PC market will be heading in the coming months.
