Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has held talks with AMD CEO Lisa Su about possible collaboration between the two rival chipmakers, according to a recording of an October 24 fireside chat Tan gave with Jimmy Cheng, president of the Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association. Tan did not publicly describe the specific areas where the companies might work together. Neither Intel nor AMD has announced any new agreement resulting from the discussions.
During the conversation, Tan laid out his plan to rebuild Intel's CPU business and make the company more responsive to customers who want silicon tuned for particular workloads. He said he is determined to restore Intel's leadership in CPUs. Tan also said Intel must move away from its traditional reluctance to alter its designs, describing customization for customer needs as a fast-growing area where he is investing heavily. He cited Intel's Xeon processors as one place where that approach is changing, along with continued work on GPUs and accelerators.
Tan identified several additional growth areas beyond standard CPUs, including application-specific integrated circuits, co-packaged optics, physical AI, and advanced packaging. He wants two or three of those businesses to eventually each contribute roughly 10% of Intel's revenue. Intel's foundry operations form another major part of his plans. Tan said the company's 18A manufacturing process has reached volume production and that development of the next-generation 14A process is progressing strongly.
Intel has released version 0.5 of the 14A process design kit, which gives chip designers the technical information and tools needed to build products for the process. Tan said version 0.9 will follow, then version 1.0 for volume production in early 2027. He said multiple customers want Intel to scale their business through the foundry, though Intel did not name those customers or disclose the size of any potential orders. In January, Intel had two prospective customers evaluating 14A test chips, with supplier decisions expected in the second half of 2026 and the first half of 2027.
Tan described foundry work as a business where trust carries as much weight as technology, since customers hand over wafers that become products their own revenue depends on. He recalled one customer who waited six to eight months hoping he would become CEO before presenting a list of 15 areas where Intel had fallen short; Tan said he addressed the problems individually, after which the customer agreed to deepen its relationship with Intel.
Any further cooperation would build on existing ties. In October 2024, Intel and AMD formed the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group with other technology companies to coordinate improvements to the x86 instruction set architecture and ease support for both companies' processors. That work has extended into AI software: last week it emerged that AMD is integrating its ZenDNN optimizations into Intel's open-source oneDNN library, bringing the companies' CPU optimization work for PyTorch AI inference under a common software path. The two have also collaborated on Advanced Matrix Extensions and other x86 capabilities through the advisory group, cooperating on shared technologies even as they compete for customers.
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