Intel is starting to act like its foundry gamble might pay for itself, with Chipzilla chief financial officer David Zinsner sounding a lot less like a man apologising for margins and more like one counting orders.
Panther Lake is doing its bit to calm the nerves, with demand apparently outpacing supply and helping the early 18A ramp look less scary.
Zinsner said: “Panther Lake as a part has been well received, obviously, particularly around battery life in particular. We have more demand than we have supply on Panther Lake.”
Zinsner painted 18A as a node that is finally behaving, with yields improving as lines mature and customer conversations turning into commitments. He flagged interest in 18A-P too, a derivative meant to let customers tune power targets without redesigning their lives.
That matters because the assumption was that external customers would wait for 14A, while Chipzilla kept 18A for itself. Now the chatter is that the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple and Nvidia are sniffing around 18A-P, with Job’s Mob tipped as a potential M-series shopper.
Zinsner said, “I think he’s now starting to recognise that this is actually a good node to offer to external customers as well. And we’ve been getting some, you know, kind of inbound interest in 18A-P as a foundry node. So that’s great to see that progress,” Zinsner said.
On 14A, Zinsner stuck to the roadmap rather than the gossip, insisting risk production is still set for 2028 with volume production in 2029. He said Chipzilla can pull risk production into 2027 to meet internal demand, and that customer timing will determine how hard it leans on capex.
The money talk shifted to packaging, where Zinsner said earlier expectations were too timid, and the wins being lined up are bigger than the polite “hundreds of millions” line investors were fed.
“So originally, when I was thinking about it [packaging business] and talking to investors, I was calibrating everybody to think about these wins in the hundreds of millions versus weaker wins, which would be in the billions. That’s the way you should think about it. And I’ve since revised that because we’re actually at the close to closing some deals that are in the billions of dollars per year in terms of revenue on packaging.”
EMIB and EMIB-T are being pitched as the hook for fabless customers, with talks said to involve Jobs’ Mob, Nvidia, Qualcomm and others. There is chatter that Nvidia could lean on EMIB for its Feynman parts, with a possible nod at GTC 2026 if the timelines behave.
The target now is for the foundry to break even by 2027, assuming those “inbound” chats turn into purchase orders and the yields keep climbing.
