Intel Could Score AMD As Foundry Customer In Another Big Vote Of Confidence
Intel's ongoing restructuring effort and attempts to boost its chip making business could get an assist from AMD, its main competitor in the x86 space. Nothing has been announcement, but Intel is reportedly in "early-stage" discussions with AMD to add the Ryzen and Radeon chip designer as a foundry client, which if solidified would be yet another vote of confidence after a string of major investments into Intel tallying billions of dollars.
SoftBank, which owns a majority stake in Arm, announced in August that it was investing $2 billion into Intel's common stock. At the time, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said the strategic investment reflected Arm's belief that Intel would play a critical role in expanding semiconductor manufacturing and supply in the United States.
Days later, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that the U.S. government was investing $8.9 billion into Intel common stock after having met with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
Just a weeks later, NVIDIA joined the fray and announced a $5 billion investment in Intel, also in common stock, as well as a multi-generation partnership to co-develop custom data center and PC products that will span hyperscale, enterprise, and consumer markets.
"AI is powering a new industrial revolution and reinventing every layer of the computing stack—from silicon to systems to software. At the heart of this reinvention is NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture," NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said at the time. "This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem—a fusion of two world-class platforms. Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing."
Knee-jerk reactions to NVIDIA's partnership with Intel called into question if this signaled the beginning of the end for AMD. It's a preposterous notion for a number of reasons, though the partnership does have potential implications on AMD's business as it, like others, navigates the burgeoning AI market.
Whether NVIDIA's deal spurred AMD into seeking a deal of its own with Intel or if Intel approached AMD is unclear, but according to Semafor and the "people familiar with the matter" that it spoke to, the two sides are in discussions for some kind of arrangement.
That's the extent of the rumor at the moment. There's no mention of how much of AMD's outsourced manufacturing would pivot from TSMC to Intel's foundries, or if a deal would also include an investment similar to SoftBank, NVIDIA, and the U.S. government.
What's also interesting to watch is how many firms end up pouring money into Intel. In addition to AMD, reports over the past several weeks have linked Intel to potential investment deals with Apple and TSMC.
