Intel's chip foundry business has won the list of seven major customers or has been exposed

In the third quarter financial report of 2022, Intel revealed that they have signed 7 of the global TOP10 semiconductor design manufacturers. The eenewseurope website attempts to analyze the components of the "seven major customers", and believes that it includes Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell and Cirrus Logic, as well as the identified NVIDIA, MediaTek, and Realtek.

The eenewseurope website believes that among the top 10 global manufacturers, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell and Cirrus Logic are all chip companies headquartered in the United States. As a local company in the United States, it is logical for them to sign a foundry cooperation with Intel. In addition, Nvidia has previously expressed interest in Intel's foundry, and now it has decided to join, but it is currently only participating in a project run by Intel for the Department of Defense. In addition, Taiwan-based chip factory MediaTek has decided to use Intel's foundry, and another Taiwan-based factory, Realtek, followed MediaTek and announced the use of Intel's foundry. It is reported that one of the seven customers has tested the 18A process for mass production in 2024 and has completed chip tapeout in the factory.

Analysts believe that so far Intel's major customers have gathered seven, while AMD, Novatek and Weir have been excluded.

The analysis pointed out that Novatek and Weir are almost unlikely to use Intel's foundry because of the type of chips. AMD's CPU, GPU, FPGA and other chip businesses compete directly with Intel, so it is not very likely to use Intel's foundry.

However, the website also stated that the actual business volume of these 7 companies is limited, and most of them are featured processes and 16nm and above processes, and there are not many advanced process OEMs.

As early as March last year, Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Kissinger announced the "IDM2.0" strategy and announced the development of the foundry business. Since then, Intel has continuously announced new moves to prove the feasibility of its "IDM2.0". In February of this year, Intel announced that it would acquire the Israeli company Tower Semiconductor (Tower) for $5.4 billion, trying to use the existing customer base of Tower Semiconductor, the world's top ten foundries, to make up for the shortcomings of its single business. The outside world believes that Intel is determined to develop the foundry business, and its logic should be to break the business model.