Financial Associated Press, July 15 (Editor: Ma Lan) Intel is rapidly rising in the chip foundry sector, and tech giants are paying attention to the company's advanced processes to address the supply challenges posed by TSMC's capacity shortages.

According to reports from KeyBanc and FactSet, Intel's next-generation process technologies, including 18A and 14A, have achieved remarkable success. The report states that Intel's wafer foundry has established partnerships with companies such as AMD, NVIDIA, Marvell, Microsoft, Micron, and OpenAI.

Due to severe capacity shortages at TSMC that cannot meet all customer demands, Intel's process technology has become an ideal choice for many external clients, with yield improvements being a significant driving force behind this decision.

The report notes that the yield of Intel's 18A process has increased from 65% in the previous quarter to 85%, second only to TSMC's N2 (2-nanometer) process yield of 90%, but far higher than Samsung's SF2 process yield of 50-60%.

Intel stated that as the production capacity of 18A processors continues to ramp up, it will launch more Panther Lake (third-generation Core Ultra processors) and Wildcat Lake (third-generation entry-level mobile processors) series products later this year. In the data center sector, Intel is expanding the capacity of Intel 4 and Intel 3, as artificial intelligence is expected to drive its CPU business to grow by 25-30% this year and by another 50% next year.

Rapid Technological Advancements

TSMC is currently the only semiconductor manufacturer capable of providing cutting-edge process and packaging technologies, but Intel is becoming a strong competitor. Intel has only launched the 18A process node, which has already entered mass production, while its more advanced 18A-P is still in risk production, and the 14A process node is expected to enter risk production in 2028 and mass production in 2029.

Additionally, Intel's advanced packaging EMIB technology has also made significant progress. The report indicates that the yield of Intel's EMIB-T chips has reached a rumored 98%. Just three months ago, the yield of Intel's EMIB chips was only 90%.

This also provides a foundation for Intel to compete with TSMC, as TSMC's CoWoS packaging technology has already achieved yields of 98% to 99%. However, TSMC's capacity limitations also leave a gap for EMIB to break through.

It is reported that products utilizing Intel's EMIB packaging technology currently include NVIDIA's Feynman GPU, Google's TPU HumuFish, and Amazon's AWS Trainium 3.

These technological advancements will undoubtedly provide confidence for tech giants to entrust Intel with chip production, while boosting Intel's future performance. KeyBanc has raised Intel's target stock price from $110 to $155, emphasizing that the company will benefit from strong AI server demand, significant yield improvements, increased customer design wins, and price hikes