Direct Connect 2025: Potentially huge but it comes with caveats
There are a lot of rumors going around about Intel Foundry customers, now SemiAccurate can confirm another one. One thing to consider here is that there are a lot of caveats surrounding these wins so pay close attention.
A year ago, SemiAccurate said Nvidia was an Intel customer and we heard some details. We were wrong about the chip but right about the customer. Unfortunately we didn’t see what Paul at Tom’s Hardware wrote earlier, the initial chip seems to be part of the US Government RAMP-C and similar programs, basically a test chip.
At their recent Direct Connect foundry conference, Intel put up slides with the program partners but for unknown reasons refuses to provide them. That said Nvidia and Broadcom were on the list among many others. Those explain the comments from Broadcom last summer, and may explain the Nvidia rumors but we think there is more depth to the green whispers. Similarly Microsoft has been publicly named by Intel as a customer and Chosun recently said there was, “a large-scale semiconductor foundry contract” between the two.
On top of this, there are a lot of contracts between Intel Foundry and customers, Amazon chief among them, for advanced packaging. Don’t discount this, especially with Nvidia strongly rumored to be on board too. Advanced Packaging is the future, TSMC is basically capacity bound there, and Intel has a staggering amount of capacity about to come on line. Given the sheer size of the buildings under construction at their Malaysia campus, Intel is about to change the game here.
So what’s new, and what are those caveats? Here is where things get interesting but in a non-technical way.
Note: The following is analysis for professional level subscribers only.
Disclosures: Charlie Demerjian and Stone Arch Networking Services, Inc. have no consulting relationships, investment relationships, or hold any investment positions with any of the companies mentioned in this report.
