Intel's foundry business has recently increased its purchase orders for semiconductor production equipment significantly, with the scale increasing by about 50% compared with the same period last year, indicating that it is accelerating the expansion of its production capacity layout in the field of wafer foundry. Although Intel's foundry business has not yet officially announced new major customer signings, this aggressive capital expenditure pace is seen as a signal of greater confidence in future orders.
The report pointed out that the market generally believes that CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who is also at the helm of Intel's foundry business, is unlikely to rashly promote such a large-scale capacity expansion without "visible" customer commitments. Previously, UBS expected that Intel's foundry would usher in a new round of important foundry contracts this fall. Now the apparent increase in equipment orders is seen as the supply chain warming up in advance to accept new customers for formal mass production.
According to industry sources quoted by Taiwan Juheng and other media, the manufacturers participating in this round of expansion span many aspects of the semiconductor manufacturing front and back segments. Among them, ASML, the supplier of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, has received the most attention. However, what really supports the operation of the production line is the large number and diverse types of supporting equipment and consumables suppliers. For example, KINK provides testing equipment, laser processing equipment and other tools to wafer fabs; E&R Engineering supplies diamond grinding discs for polishing and flattening wafer surfaces to production lines. These all form an important part of Intel's new round of equipment purchases.
A modern semiconductor factory is far more than just purchasing a few EUV exposure machines. Its production system consists of many processes such as chemical processing, detection, metrology (measurement), and surface treatment. Each process requires special equipment support. Intel is currently one of the major customers of ASML’s high numerical aperture (High-NA) EUV scanners, which will be used to support the advancement of its 14A process node. At the same time, Intel also needs to continue to introduce and update a large number of process equipment on 18A, 18A-P, 18A-PT and other nodes, and simultaneously increase the production capacity of the 14A node to form a complete advanced process portfolio.
There have been multiple rumors that large chip design companies such as Apple, AMD, Nvidia, Google and Broadcom are evaluating the use of Intel's wafer foundry and advanced packaging capabilities in high-end product lines. Relevant discussions have focused on Intel's 18A, 18A-P, 18A-PT process nodes, as well as the 14A node that is about to be put into use, which is regarded as an alternative for these potential customers in terms of high performance, low power consumption and process diversity.
At the specific customer level, sources said that Apple is expected to transfer some of its M-series "self-developed Apple Silicon" notebook processors to Intel's 18A-P node production starting in 2027 to achieve a differentiated layout of supply chain diversification and process routes. In addition, Google is reported to be considering using advanced packaging technologies such as Intel's EMIB and Foveros three-dimensional stacking to provide packaging and integration services for some of its TPU dedicated acceleration chips to improve system-level bandwidth and interconnection efficiency.
Based on current information, Intel's heavy investment in wafer foundry equipment shows that it not only strives to fulfill its previous promise of "coming from behind" in advanced processes such as 18A, but also hopes to win orders from leading customers such as Apple, AMD, NVIDIA, Google, and Broadcom in the high-end computing and artificial intelligence chip market through 14A and advanced packaging technology. The industry generally believes that if the relevant foundry contracts are officially implemented before the end of this year, Intel's 50% increase in equipment orders will become one of the key preludes to its transformation into an "open foundry platform."