Intel Can Supply Only About Half of What Its Customers Want. That's a Better Problem Than It Sounds.
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) CEO Lip-Bu Tan made an unusual admission at Splunk's .conf26 conference in Denver this week. Demand for the chipmaker's processors has outrun its factories so badly, he said, that Intel is meeting only about 50% of what its customers are asking for. CEOs have called him asking for more chips, Tan said, and he has had to apologize because Intel's capacity can't keep up. The driver, according to Tan, is an explosion in demand for central processing units (CPUs) to run artificial intelligence (AI) inference -- the work AI models and agents do after they're trained. That work leans on CPUs, he argued, not just the graphics chips that dominate AI headlines. Shares of Intel trade around $109 as of this writing, up about 6% this week and more than triple their price of a year ago. Continue reading