On Tuesday, Intel (INTC.O) disclosed deepening operating losses for its foundry business, a blow to the chipmaker as it tries to regain a technology lead it lost in recent years to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (2330. TW).
According to Intel, the manufacturing division's operating losses in 2023 totaled $7 billion, a more significant loss than the $5.2 billion operating losses for the previous year. The unit's revenue was $18.9 billion in 2023, a 31% decrease from $27.49 billion last year.
Intel Reveals $7 Billion Largest Operating Loss
Intel shares were down 4.3% after the documents were submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In a presentation for the investors, Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said that the company's chip-making business would have its largest operating losses in 2024 and anticipates operating break-even by around 2027.
Gelsinger claimed that the foundry business was hindered by poor decisions, such as the decision made a year ago not to use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machinery made by the Dutch company ASML. Even though those devices are over $150 million, they are more affordable than the previous chip-making tools.
He noted that one of Intel's mistakes was contracting out around 30% of the wafer production to outside companies like TSMC. It seeks to reduce that percentage to about 20%.
As previous machines are phased out, Intel has shifted to employing EUV tools to cover increasing production demands.
Gelsinger said they see that they were very competitive now on price in the post-EUV era, but in the pre-EUV era, they carried a lot of costs and were uncompetitive.
Intel intends to invest $100 billion in the construction or expansion of chip factories in four US states. Its business turnaround plan relies on convincing external companies to use its manufacturing services.
Furthermore, Intel informed investors that part of that approach included reporting the performance of manufacturing operations as a separate unit.
The business has made significant investments to close the gap with its two main rivals in the chip industry, TSMC and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
Intel Leaks New Gaming CPU
According to a fresh Intel CPU leak, the official product name for the next Arrow Lake CPU architecture will be Intel Core Ultra 200.
As anticipated, this indicates that the upcoming generation of Intel CPUs, sometimes called 'Intel 15th gen,' will adopt the same naming scheme as its latest Meteor Lake chips rather than its 14th gen desktop chips.
Although several architectural information about the new Intel chips that will compete with AMD for spots on their list of the best gaming CPUs have emerged, this is the first indication of the naming scheme they will see for them.
Since these chips came just after the introduction of the Intel Core Ultra 100 series, the first line of Intel Core Ultra CPUs, last year, it seemed almost inevitable that this would be the name given to Arrow Lake.
These chips were built on the troubled Meteor Lake architecture, which Intel ultimately had to forego for desktop processors, releasing only mobile chips for laptops.
Regarding the release date, the 15th generation of Intel Core processors may be revealed in June at the Computex 2024 trade exhibition in Taiwan. If not, a debut is anticipated later this year.
