As TSMC helps Intel establish its foundries in Arizona, Intel is busy recruiting TSMC's top talent for its own Intel Foundry business.

Adding to the intrigue, Intel has outsourced the production of its next-gen Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" CPUs to TSMC. These chips, featuring CPU, GPU, NPU, and on-package memory on a single chiplet, will be crafted using TSMC's 3nm process nodes. The SoC and I/O dies, however, will be made on TSMC's 6nm process node.

This marks the first time in Intel's history that it has outsourced its entire mainstream consumer platform series to TSMC, which will undoubtedly boost TSMC's revenue in 2025 and keep its fabs buzzing with activity from other clients like AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA.

Intel's talent raid on TSMC is expected to have long-term repercussions, as Intel Foundry expands, secures more clients, and eventually churns out world-leading semiconductors and next-gen chips.