Intel Ready To Go It Alone On Chip Manufacturing, Chief Says

Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said recently that the company has no plans to spin out its contract chip manufacturing business, as reported by Kenneth Li and Max A. Cherney for Reuters.

Gelsinger has moved Intel's manufacturing unit into what is now called Intel Foundry Services (IFS) that operates as a business within Intel. I Photo: Intel Corporation

Gelsinger has moved Intel's manufacturing unit into what is now called Intel Foundry Services (IFS) that operates as a business within Intel.

IFS will break out financials beginning in the second quarter of next year, Gelsinger said.

Intel isn't yet prepared to break out IFS into a separate entity and list it, as it did with its Mobileye autonomous driving business, and plans to with the programmable chip unit in the next two to three years.

"The idea of the internal foundry model, we think, is the right path for us in the current environment," Gelsinger said in an interview with Reuters. 

In some ways, Intel already operates two separate companies—a chip design business and a factory unit—in part to give its IFS customers confidence that Intel is a "clean supplier" of manufacturing capacity, Gelsinger said.

For the moment, there are distinct advantages to operating together, in part because most of the factory capacity is used by Intel at the moment, the CEO said.

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