Intel pumps $1 billion into fund to support chip manufacturing ecosystem

Intel pumps $1 billion into fund to support chip manufacturing ecosystem

Intel is establishing a new fund worth $1 billion. With this it wants to support organizations that want to bake their chips in Intel’s factories. The company hopes to boost that new business branch in this way.

Intel Capital and Intel Foundry Services are jointly setting up a $1 billion fund. The fund is intended for organizations that plan to bake their own chips in Intel’s factories. Under CEO Pat Gelsinger, the company plans to open up its so-called foundry business to third parties, competing with TSMC and Samsung. This is a historic move: traditionally, Intel has produced almost exclusively for its own account. Qualcomm is reportedly already a customer.

The fund will enable investments in start-ups as well as more mature companies looking to innovate in chip land. Intel is particularly keen on investment opportunities that can shorten time to market. Among other things, the company is thinking about better software tools, innovative chip architectures and advanced packaging technology (where the various baked chips are processed into a single usable component).

Open ecosystem

On the sidelines of the fund’s creation, Intel also announced that it will work with industry partners to advance technologies. These include modular chip design with an open chiplet-based platform and further support for chip designs that support more than one architecture. These include, for example, x86 processors with accelerator components based on ARM or RISC-V.

“Foundry customers are quickly embracing a modular approach to design to differentiate their products and get them to market faster,” Gelsinger commented. “With our new investment fund and open chip platform, we can support the ecosystem to build out disruptive technology across the full spectrum of chip architecture.”

Impact

That open ecosystem is a distant dream for now. On the impact of the fund and collaborations, we have to wait and see. Intel may be new to the foundry business when it comes to chip production for customers, but the company remains the market leader in x86 both in endpoints and data centers. For the first time, Intel is no longer the world’s largest chip manufacturer. When Intel puts its weight behind something, you can bet something will move.