Dive Brief:
- Intel’s long-standing partner, Amazon Web Services, is joining in on the chipmaker’s internal foundry, Intel announced in a Sept. 16 press release.
- The multi-year, multi-billion-dollar co-investment tasks Intel with producing custom chip designs covering product and wafers. Specifically, Intel will produce an AI fabric chip for AWS on Intel 18A as well as a custom Xeon 6 chip on Intel 3.
- The production will occur at Intel’s two upcoming $28 billion semiconductor manufacturing facilities in New Albany, Ohio, where AWS also has a major presence.
Dive Insight:
The companies’ partnership dates back to 2006 when Amazon first launched its Elastic Compute Cloud instance featuring Intel’s chips, AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a company press release.
“Intel’s chip design and manufacturing capabilities, combined with the comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, AI and machine learning services of AWS, will unleash innovation across our shared ecosystem and support the growth of both businesses, as well as a sustainable domestic AI supply chain,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said in the release.
Ohio has become a hub for the two tech companies. In the announcement, AWS promised to invest $7.8 billion to expand its data center operations in central Ohio, on top of the $10.3 billion it has invested in the state since 2015.
The AWS U.S. East (Ohio) Region is available for multiple services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Simple Storage Service, and Amazon Relational Database Service, according to its website.
Intel may also expand its partnership with AWS in the future.
“Going forward, Intel and AWS also intend to explore the potential for further designs to be produced by Intel based on Intel 18A and future process nodes including Intel 18AP and Intel 14A, which is expected to be produced in Intel’s Ohio facilities, as well as the migration of existing Intel designs to these platforms,” according to the Sept. 16 announcement.
The new deal, along with Intel’s additional $3 billion CHIPS and Science Act funding it received from the Department of Defense on the same day, is part of the chipmaker’s attempts to build up its foundry business unit, launched in 2021 to become a global chip manufacturer to rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
The second CHIPS announcement is separate from the $8.5 billion funding Intel received in March to support semiconductor manufacturing at sites in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio and Oregon.
