Loss at Intel’s Foundry business reaches $7 billion – Computer – News

Intel’s Foundry chip manufacturing business had a loss of $7 billion in fiscal 2023, almost $2 billion more than a year earlier. This was mainly due to ‘wrong choices made in the past’, says Intel’s CEO, including a late move to ASML’s EUV technology.

CEO Pat Gelsinger expects the Foundry branch to make an even bigger loss in 2024, but that this is a low point. From then on, the losses must decrease, after which the business unit must break even in 2027, Reuters writes. Gelsinger says the Foundry business has achieved poor results due to poor choices in the past, including last year’s decision not to use ASML EUV machines. These are expensive chip machines, but they are more cost-efficient.

Meanwhile, Intel Foundry has started using ASML’s EUV machines, which will slowly replace Foundry’s current chip machines. As a result, Foundry expects to be able to compete better with other chip manufacturers. Partly because of these wrong choices, Intel had to have more of its own chips made by external chip manufacturers, such as TSMC. Intel wants about twenty percent of its own chips to be made by external manufacturers, last year this was around thirty percent.

Previously, Intel released the Foundry quarterly results as part of the broader Intel annual results. As a result, it was not clear what Foundry’s precise profit figures were. Intel is now releasing these figures separately. The figures also show that turnover fell from 27.5 billion to 18.9 billion dollars. According to Intel, this was mainly because Intel had fewer chips made at Foundry. External companies actually had chips made more often at Foundry; this turnover doubled from $479 million to $953 million.