There’s more news on Intel’s plan to reinvent itself as a manufacturer of other companies’ chips—and it’s not particularly encouraging for anyone who has been hoping for a quick turnaround.
The legacy processor giant yesterday unveiled a new financial reporting structure that accounts for the effective separation of its chip development (Products) and manufacturing (Foundry) businesses, which it announced in February. And in doing so, it filed a retrospective revision to its 10-K for the last quarter of 2023, revealing growing losses in its Foundry unit—nearly $7 billion in 2023, up from just over $5 billion in each of the preceding two years.
The revelation knocked Intel’s share price by over 7%, wiping more than $13 billion off the company’s value, and CEO Pat Gelsinger is desperate to reassure investors that Intel Foundry will be profitable. But not just yet. Indeed, this year will probably pan out even worse, he acknowledged yesterday, before an improvement leading to break-even in 2027.
There are clear reasons for this slow progress.
Intel’s only really big Foundry deal that’s been announced thus far is a recently won contract (reportedly worth up to $15 billion) to make Microsoft’s custom chips, which it will start doing using its upcoming 18A manufacturing process, due to roll out by the end of this year. But Intel gave itself a disadvantage by last year deciding to forego the use of ASML’s bleeding-edge extreme ultraviolet (EUV) chipmaking machines.
Gelsinger has since reversed that decision but, for now, Intel is forced to outsource a sizeable chunk of its production to Taiwan’s TSMC, its biggest rival in the foundry game. “In the post EUV era, we see that we’re very competitive now on price, performance [and] back to leadership,” he told investors yesterday, as quoted by Reuters. “In the pre-EUV era we carried a lot of costs and [were] uncompetitive.” Unfortunately, even if Intel Foundry reaches the 40% gross margin it’s forecasting for 2030, that’s still behind TSMC’s margin, which was 53% in Q4.
Speaking of TSMC, the market leader just had to pause production due to Taiwan’s biggest earthquake in a quarter century. It says the stoppages were procedural, and workers have already returned to some factory lines, but analysts have pointed out that any disruption to TSMC’s operations could have spoiled entire batches of chips. A lot of companies will be nervously keeping their eye on the situation.
More news below.
David Meyer
Correction, April 3, 2024: This article was updated to correct information about the chronology of Intel’s rollout of EUV technology and to clarify the reported value of Intel’s Microsoft deal.
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NEWSWORTHY
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ON OUR FEED
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BEFORE YOU GO
Browser with downloadable AIs. The browser firm Opera, which tends to be more innovative than popular, will let users download large language models such as Meta’s Llama and Google’s Gemma, to be run locally on their computers, through the Opera One browser. TechCrunch reports that the feature will offer over 150 AI models, each of which will be bigger than 2GB. Opera VP Jan Standal: “It is expected that they may reduce in size as they get more and more specialized for the tasks at hand.” Meanwhile, the privacy-first mobile browser Brave also just integrated an AI assistant that taps into a choice of different LLMs.
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