A Sketchy Report Suggests That Intel Plans To Offload Its Sub-3nm Processes On TSMC, And An Industry Analyst Contends That It’s All Downhill From Here

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It seems increasingly likely that Intel's indigenous resources will not be able to support the magnitude of capital expenditure required to advance and sustain its cutting-edge production nodes (sub-3nm), based on unconfirmed reports and the conclusion drawn by a well-regarded industry analyst.

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To wit, an unconfirmed report published today in a Taiwan newspaper has asserted that Intel is gearing up to offload its sub-3nm production nodes on TSMC as losses in its foundry division continue to mount, with margins further pressured by the ongoing production capacity expansion for the Intel 3 and Intel 4 processes at the company's sprawling facility in Ireland.

At the same time, Intel is trying to aggressively cut costs by slashing dividends, implementing a mass layoff plan equivalent to around 15 percent of its workforce strength recorded at the start of 2024, and pare or outright sell its majority stakes in ancillary businesses such as the FPGA unit Altera and the autonomous mobility-focused company Mobileye. Intel intends to present its board with an array of strategic options at an upcoming meeting in September.

Meanwhile, as per a number of recent reports, Broadcom was left unimpressed by the yield on Intel's cutting-edge 18A process node, with some of the engineers going so far as to doubt the node's ability to move into high-volume production. Of course, Intel might still be able to iron out all of the kinks before the node moves into the proverbial high gear in 2025.

Concurrently, Lu Xingzhi or Andrew Lu, a well-regarded industry analyst, recently penned an interesting Facebook post, arguing that Intel's inflows were now insufficient to support a CapEx of between $5 billion and $6