Artificial intelligence leader Nvidia said Thursday it will take a $5 billion stake in struggling chipmaker Intel.
The move comes weeks after the Trump administration engineered an extraordinary deal to assume a 10 percent stake in Intel — a level of government intervention in private enterprise rarely seen outside times of war or economic crisis.
“Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing,” Nvidia founder Jensen Huang said in a statement on Thursday.
How so? Intel has been struggling for years. This gives Nvidia a chance to get next generation chips manufactured in USA. And many will be designed to enchance PC performance.
Sounds like a good deal to me for Nvidia. Typical of the kind of move we expect from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. And announce shortly after China announced they will discourage use of Nvidia chips in China.
Nvidia clearly has first rate leadership. Even after AI purchases mature I think we can count on Nvida to lead us into new markets. They have done it again and again.
We shall see how this will develop. Are you buying Intel stock? Nvidia?
Not recently. I have a small position in Intel since forever, and also a small position in NVDA since a year or so ago. But I have a large position in AMD since 20 years ago.
Yes, Intel is still struggling, but I fail to see how 5 billion from NVIDIA (or Uncle Sam) will help get Intel past their process and foundry difficulties. There’s a reason NVIDIA has TSMC make their chips: they are best able to!
As an AMD shareholder, I’d rather NVIDIA buy a stake in AMD, but since they’re a direct competitor, that would be unlikely for a bunch of reasons.
OK, so Nvidia learns how to make chips–integrating forward. They may very well be better managers than Intel even in the chip foundry business. And Nvidia clearly has abundant funds for the investment. To them its pocket change.
Only if they intended to shutter it and sell off the parts. What does NVIDIA know about chip fabrication? Serious question. NVIDIA has some great chip designers, but designing and constructing chip fabs? NVIDIA’s chip designs need the most advanced process technology possible, and that’s TSMC’s domain. I think NVIDIA would be better served by investing billions more in TSMC to help them construct more fabs at a quicker pace in the U.S.
I did read that Intel will not be making gpu’s for NVDA which seems smart since Intel has been having all kinds of foundry issues as the scale has gotten smaller with die sizes and Intel has in the past always wanted to own/make all their components…doc
It should be easy for Nvidia to incorporate gps and AI features into next generation PC microprocessors. That could give Intel a competitive advantage and expand Nvidia sales into a new market segment.
And they get access to chip fabrication know how which could offer potential for growth. TSMC manufactures high value Nvida chips but they are heavily into low margin commodity chips.
Intel_18A has about the same power/performance as the latest version of TSMC N3. TSMC N2 is around 15% better, and INTC has said the nova lake (late 2026 desktop) will be a TSMC N2 part. Intel has also said they will stop development on the next generation Intel_14A unless a large foundry partner is found; Intel product alone is not enough to support new node development.
This NVIDIA announcement means Intel will proceed with Intel_14A development. How Intel_14A compares to TSMC N2 (or the generation after N2) remains to be seen. Of note though is it uses the latest High NA EUV steppers from ASML, which Intel received almost a year ahead of TSMC.
I haven’t commented on this thread from some time ago but I thought it was pretty likely that the main priority was in getting Nvidia a way to be less dependent upon Arm and more able to get into the x86 game for e.g. servers and maybe even mobile.
From their press release:
“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,” said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “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.”
“Intel’s x86 architecture has been foundational to modern computing for decades — and we are innovating across our portfolio to enable the workloads of the future,” said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel. “Intel’s leading data center and client computing platforms, combined with our process technology, manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities, will complement NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing leadership to enable new breakthroughs for the industry. We appreciate the confidence Jensen and the NVIDIA team have placed in us with their investment and look forward to the work ahead as we innovate for customers and grow our business.”
The foundry services, I reckoned, was a bit of a longer term goal, and a gamble, and Intel having said that they need to work much more closely with their customers on 14A than they did on 18A, I think they need those relationships but it will be a few years before anything can emerge from that.
