> For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs.
I don't think this is Intel trying to save itself, it's nVidia. Intel GPUs have been in 3rd place for a long time, but their integrated graphics are widely available and come in 2nd place because nVidia can't compete in the x86 space. Intel graphics have been closing the gap with AMD and are now within what? A factor of 2 or less (1.5?)
IMHO we will soon see more small/quiet PCs without a slot for a graphics card, relying on integrated graphics. nVidia has no place in that future. But now, by dropping $5B on Intel they can get into some of these SoCs and not become irrelevant.
The nice thing for Intel is that they might be able to claim graphics superiority in SoC land since they are currently lagging in CPU.
wirybeige · 33m ago
Xe2 is superior to current AMD integrated already
yujzgzc · 21m ago
I think the comparison was between Nvidia standalone graphics chips and Intel integrated graphics capabilities.
ddalex · 2h ago
That was targeted at supporting more tightly integrated and performant Macbooks .... it flopped because Apple came up with M1, not because it was bad per se.
JonChesterfield · 1h ago
The ryzen APUs had a rocky start but are properly good now, the concept is sound
intvocoder · 2h ago
apple never shipped a product with that, but it made for an excellent hackintosh
joz1-k · 1h ago
RIP Arc and Gaudi. There is no other way how to read this. Fewer competitors => higher prices.
philistine · 50s ago
Absolutely. This is terrible news for high emission gamers, who have been living under the boot of Nvidia for decades.
herodoturtle · 1h ago
> Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped
/me picturing Khaby Lame gesturing his hands at an obvious workaround.
linuxftw · 1h ago
To me, this just validates what AMD has been doing for over a decade. Integrated GPUs for personal computing are the way forward.
qzw · 2h ago
Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes. That deal was arguably what saved Apple near its nadir. I’m not a fan of Intel’s past monopolistic practices, but for the sake of sustaining competition in the CPU/GPU market, I hope this deal works out for them even half as well as the MS deal did for Apple.
jasode · 1h ago
>Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes.
Doesn't feel the same because the 1997 investment was arranged by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. He had a long personal relationship with Bill Gates so could just call him to drop the outstanding lawsuits and get a commitment for future Office versions on the Mac. Basically, Steve Jobs at relatively young age of 42 was back at Apple in "founder mode" and made bold moves that the prior CEO Gil Amelio couldn't do.
Intel doesn't have the same type of leadership. Their new CEO is a career finance/investor instead of a "new products new innovation" type of leader. This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.
jszymborski · 54m ago
> This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.
Stinks of Mussolini-style Corporatism to me.
kjksf · 23m ago
You try to pin this (hypothetical) as fascism.
Let's assume Trump admin pressured Nvidia to invest in intel.
Chips act (voted by Democrats / Biden) gave Intel up to $7.8 billion of YOUR money (taxes) in form of direct grants.
Was it more of "Mussolini-style corporatism" to you or not?
unethical_ban · 10m ago
The parent comment is speculation. But yes, speculatively, a legislative act of investment would be less authoritarian than the whims of an executive that puts tariffs on your product constantly unless you do what he says.
I don't think that's an apt comparison, given that Microsoft and Apple were more direct competitors than Intel and Nvidia; the latter have a more symbiotic relationship. I think the rationale is closer to the competitor of my competitor is my friend -- they face two threats by AMD growing larger in the CPU market:
- a bigger R&D budget for their main competitor in the GPU market
- since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.
scrlk · 1h ago
> since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.
This is why they built the Grace CPU - noting that they're using Arm's Neoverse V2 cores rather than their own design.
readams · 1h ago
Here's Nvidia's CPUs, which are increasingly a required part of their data center offerings:
Nah I have feeling this is part of the result of the arm twisting to be allowed to sell to China.
jeffwask · 47m ago
It's even more ironic when you remember in 2005 the tables were turned, and Intel was trying to buy Nvidia.
mrtksn · 58m ago
Does intel have someone who will return and change the course of the company or return to its original mission or something of that sort?
sigwinch · 55m ago
Oh, I bet Elon has been handed some ideas.
aenopix · 17m ago
Competition?
vjvjvjvjghv · 1h ago
All they need now is a CEO like Steve Jobs…
znpy · 1h ago
> Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps?
Had Apple failed, Microsoft would probably have been found to have a clear monopolistic position. And microsoft was already in hot waters due to InternetExplorer IIRC.
rhetocj23 · 25m ago
Yep. MSFT needed Apple because of Anti-trust issues.
Apples demise wouldve nailed the case.
fidotron · 2h ago
Possibly more curious than the investment:
> Nvidia will also have Intel build custom x86 data center CPUs for its AI products for hyperscale and enterprise customers.
Hell has frozen over at Intel. Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next? Presumably someone over there doesn't want the AI wave to turn into a repeat of their famous success with mobile.
In the event Intel ever do get US based fabrication semi competitive again (and the national security motivation for doing so is intense) nVidia will likely have to be a major customer, so this does make sense. I remain doubtful that Intel can pull it off, and it will have to come from someone else.
baq · 1h ago
If you were a big enough customer you could get a SKU for you, too. E.g. hyperscalers have Xeons which are not available for any other customers for any price.
fidotron · 1h ago
But what they've completely resisted so far is any non trivial modification.
They turned down Acorn about the 286, which led to Acorn creating the Arm, they have turned down various console makers, they turned down Apple on the iPhone, and so on. In all cases they thought the opportunities were beneath them.
Intel has always been too much about what they want to sell you, not what you need. That worked for them when the two aligned over backwards compat.
Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.
brookst · 1h ago
Intel’s test for new business ideas has always been: will it make $1B in the first year?
It leads to mistakes like you mention, where a new market segment or new entrant is not a sure thing. And then it leads to mistakes like Larrabee and Optane where they talk themselves into overconfidence (“obviously this is a great product, we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t guaranteed to make $1B in the first year”).
It is very hard to grow a business with zero risk appetite. You can’t take risky high return bets, and you can’t acknowledge the real risk in “safe” bets.
actionfromafar · 54m ago
Larrabee could have grown into something very cool if they had not dropped it and made it available on the open market, donated to universities and so on. Transputer vibes.
keyringlight · 15m ago
I think for Larrabee it was intel experimenting to find other markets for their Atom cores, and if there was market for it they needed to have the tenacity to cultivate it. Similar to how nvidia took huge amounts of time establishing GPGPU, CUDA, then machine learning, through to reaping the rewards over the past few years.
2010-2011 was also the time that AMD were starting to moan a bit about DX11 and the higher level APIs not being sufficient to get the most out of GPUs, which led to Mantle/Vulkan/DX12 a few years down the road. Intel did a bit regarding massively parallel software rendering, with the flexibility to run on anything x86 and implement features as you liked, or AMD's efforts for 'fusion' (APU+GPU, after recently acquiring ATi) or HSA which I seem to recall was about dispatching different types of computing to the best suited processor(s) in the system for it. However I got the impression a lot of development effort is more interested in progressing on what they already have instead of starting in a new direction, and game studios want to ship finished and stable/predictable product, which is where support from intel would have helped.
mschuster91 · 1h ago
> they have turned down various console makers
The problem is, console manufacturers know precisely how much of their product they anticipate to sell, and it's usually a lot. The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far.
And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to command higher prices and thus higher margins.
> they turned down Apple on the iPhone
Intel just was (and frankly, still is) unable to compete on the power envelope with ARM, that's why you never saw x86 take off on Android as well despite quite a few attempts at it.
Apple only chose to go for Intel with its MacBook line as PowerPC was practically dead and offered no way to extract more performance, and they dropped Intel as soon as their own CPUs were competitive. To get Intel CPUs to the same level of power efficiency that M-series CPUs have would require a full rework of the entire CPU infrastructure and external stack, that would require money that even Intel at its best frankly did not have. And getting x86 to be power effective enough for a phone? Just forget it.
> Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.
Actually, that is surprising for me as well. NVIDIA's Tegra should easily be powerful enough to run the OS for training or inference workload. If I were to guess, NVIDIA wants to avoid getting caught too hard on the "selling AI shovels" train.
geertj · 1h ago
> Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next?
This is very likely the new culture that LBT is bringing in. This can only be good.
JCM9 · 1h ago
Intel is a strategically important company for the United States. This smells like a token investment to appease the US government. Not saying it’s bad, but very much looks like that.
adrr · 1h ago
Only the fab part is. Intel needs to separate the two. Maybe Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm can buy the the fab part.
HDThoreaun · 2m ago
Being fabless is a huge strategic advantage to chip designers. Intel's biggest problem has been that theyre stuck on shitty fabs. Nvidia, amd, and qualcomm do not want to be in that position.
mschuster91 · 1h ago
Why would either of these three be interested in buying a fab? The only other large player with its own fab is Samsung and Samsung has the same problem that Intel has, namedly a fab that is nowhere near close to TSMC.
I agree that Intel would be better served to spin off its fab division, a potential buyer could be the US government for military and national security relevant projects.
adrr · 42m ago
Someone could be interested. It could also be Global Foundries. High risk big reward bet which the government is willing to help mitigate some of the risk with funding.
They just need to separate business units.
DanielHB · 29m ago
Not an expert in the area, but I think the highest of the high-end chips is a big market, but not the biggest market as revenue for fabs. It is just the most profitable part of the market.
Maybe this changed with the AI race but there are plenty of people buying older chips by the millions for all sorts of products.
whycome · 1h ago
Also, the US Govt bought $8.9B in stock last month I guess
Correction: Renegotiated a prior loan as a $8.9B stock purchase.
phkahler · 29m ago
Does that mean Intel doesn't ever have to pay it back?
KeplerBoy · 13m ago
It means Intel already paid it back. The dilution hurt all other owners.
ecocentrik · 14m ago
I think it means there is no clear terms for buying back those shares.
wheybags · 1h ago
I wonder what this means for Intel's Arc lineup. Would be a bit crazy to have privileged access to a competitor's roadmap through just owning a chunk of them. I also have to admit I really hope they dont cancel them. A triopoly is at least better than a duopoly (or realistically, a monopoly as AMD's competitiveness in gpus is pretty questionable)
vid · 34m ago
That's what I think of, along with favour from their new investment sibling, the US government. AMD doesn't want to be super competitive, they like their margins and being second choice in a hypetastic market. Even though Arc has very low adoption, it was making signs of doing scrappy things, like enabling two 24GB GPUs on one card from third party vendors, which got the hobby/upstart community pretty excited. Ultimately it's not a real market giving the people what they want via competition, it's all contrived by politics and the biggest players.
JonChesterfield · 2h ago
I can think of _nothing_ with a better shot at unseating nvidia than a merger with intel. Fingers crossed for ever closer union between the two.
ericmay · 2h ago
They aren’t merging - this is Nvidia ensuring their tech is in Intel chips.
rm445 · 58m ago
Might rather see it the other way around - Nvidia getting license to create products with x86(_64) CPUs integrated in the silicon. Nvidia are the big boy in this transaction and they'll get what they want out of it. But I can see the attraction for Intel.
JonChesterfield · 2h ago
Yes indeed. It's still a step in that direction that opens up a bunch of communication channels between the execs of the two companies. Things move slowly.
imiric · 2h ago
You can't be serious.
Intel was well on its way to be a considerable threat to NVIDIA with their Arc line of GPUs, which are getting better and cheaper with each generation. Perhaps not in the enterprise and AI markets yet, but certainly on the consumer side.
This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both Intel and for consumers. Intel is only helping NVIDIA, which puts them further away from unseating them than they were before.
Competition is always a net positive for consumers, while mergers are always a net negative. This news will only benefit shareholders of both companies, and Intel shareholders only in the short-term. In the long-term, it's making NVIDIA more powerful.
tremon · 1h ago
I'm not convinced. The latest Battlemage benchmarks I've seen put the B580 at the same performance as the RTX 4060 (which is a two years old entry-level card) but with 50% more power consumption (80W vs 125W average). It's good to have more than one open source supporting graphics vendor, but I don't think Nvidia is losing any sleep over Intel's GPU offerings.
throwawaythekey · 49m ago
Battlemage had the best perf/% and most the driver issues from Alchemist had been ironed out. Another generation or two of steady progress and intel have a big winner on their hands.
Intel's foundry costs are probably competitive with nvidia too - nvidia has too much opportunity cost if nothing else.
JonChesterfield · 1h ago
I'm sure Larrabee will be superb any year now. The Xeon phi will rise again. For supporting evidence, the success of Aurora. Weren't the loss-leading arc GPUs cancelled as well? Maybe that only one generation of them, it does look like some are on the market now.
I think this partnership will damage nvidia. It might damage intel, but given they're circling the drain already, it's hard to make matters worse.
It's probably bad for consumers in every dimension.
Or to take the opposite, if nvidia rolled over intel and fired essentially everyone in the management chain and started trying to run the fabs themselves, good chance they'd turn the ship around and become even more powerful than they already are.
whatever1 · 57m ago
Has Nvidia has ran any fab successfully ?
JonChesterfield · 37m ago
Nope. It will/would be a learning curve. They'd probably seed it with strategic hires from TSMC.
imiric · 1h ago
> It might damage intel, but given they're circling the drain already, it's hard to make matters worse.
How was Intel "circling the drain"?
They have a very competitive offering of CPUs, APUs, and GPUs, and the upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake architectures are very promising. Their products compete with AMD, NVIDIA, and ARM SoCs from the likes of Apple.
Intel may have been in a rut years ago, but they've recovered incredibly well.
This is why I'm puzzled by this decision, and as a consumer, I would rather use a fully Intel system than some bastardized version that also involves NVIDIA. We've seen how well that works with Optimus.
JonChesterfield · 1h ago
None of their products are competitive, they fired the CEO who was meant to save them, fired tens of thousands of their engineers, sold off massive chunks of the company, they're still bleeding money and begging for state support?
Also their network cards no longer work properly which is deeply aggravating as that used to be something I could rely on, just bought some realtek ones to work around the intel ones falling over.
gregoryl · 33m ago
I have bad news about realtek networking...
pengaru · 14m ago
When your own most competitive products are being made by your competitor for you, while you still have the cost center of running your own production fabs incapable of producing your most competitive products, and receiving bailouts just to keep the lights on...
Some would say that's circling the drain.
Retric · 1h ago
Mergers where one company is on the verge of failing can be a net positive for consumers. Most obviously this happens when banks fail and people’s bank cards still work etc and at least initially the branches stay open.
Intel isn’t at that point, but the companies trajectory isn’t looking good. I’d happily sacrifice ARC to keep a duopoly in CPU’s.
mschuster91 · 1h ago
> This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both Intel and for consumers.
Consumers still have AMD as an alternative for very decent and price attractive GPUs (and CPUs).
joz1-k · 2h ago
About 16 years ago, Intel was considered an ugly monopoly that Nvidia didn't like [0]. It seems as if they have switched sides now.
nVidia has also been licensing their GPU IP to MediaTek recently, who are working on a 2nd generation of a SoC that combines their ARM cores with nVidia GPUs now, catering to e.g. the automotive market.
Looks like using GPU IP to take over other brands' product lines is now officially an nVidia strategy.
I guess the obvious worry here is whether Intel will continue development of their own dGPUs, which have a lovely open driver stack.
KeplerBoy · 29m ago
Seems Nvidia needs an alternative to MediaTek or wants to pressure MediaTek given the announcement of x86 Intel/Nvidia SoCs and the delay of DGX Spark, GB10 and N1X.
They wanted to launch DGX Spark early summer and it's nowhere to be seen.
Panzer04 · 2h ago
Unless Nvidia outright absorbs intel I think Intel would have to be kind of crazy to stop developing GPUs.
So long as the AI craze is hanging in there it feels like having that expertise and IP is going to have high potential upside.
sho_hn · 2h ago
I'd agree, but Intel has also halted dGPU development efforts before, cf. the canned Larrabee project. Which was more troubled on the technology side however.
ACCount37 · 1h ago
Yeah, Larrabee was nowhere near what they have now with Intel Arc.
Would be foolish to throw that away now that they're finally getting closer to "a product someone may want to buy" with things like B50 and B60.
DarkmSparks · 2h ago
After the arm buyout fell through, I guess this is the next best thing. Plus a good deal for nvidia since Intel is pretty desperate at this point.
bilekas · 1h ago
This really wasn't a surprise, nVidia has seemed to be itching for a meaningful entry to the CPU market and when intel's CEO started undoing all and any future investment in the company it was clear everything was being setup for a sell off.
5 Billion is just a start but this is a gift for nVidia to eventually squire intel.
xbar · 43m ago
I think if Nvidia wanted to acquire Intel, they would acquire Intel.
Intel has never been so cheap relative to the kinds of IP assets that Nvidia values and probably will not be ever again if this and other investments keep it afloat.
Trump's FTC would not block.
You write with proper case-sensitivity for their titles which suggests some historic knowledge of the two. They have been very close partners on CPU+GPU for decades. This investment is not fundamentally changing that.
The current CEO is more like a CFO--cutting costs and eliminating waste. There are two exits from that: sell off, as you say, and re-investment in the products of most likely future profit. This could be a signal that the latter is the plan and that the competitive aspects of the nVidia-intel partnership will be sidelined for a while.
gorgoiler · 2h ago
> It is unclear if Intel will issue new stock for Nvidia to purchase
Erm, a rather important point to bury down the story. The fiest question on anyone’s lips will be is this $5bn to build new chip technology, or $5bn for employees to spend on yachts?
Mistletoe · 2h ago
It’s the most important part of the story. It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this. Why hold stock in Intel if the only people that ever buy the real stock and create buy pressure are the plebs? Here is the previous time…
> Intel stock experienced dilution because the U.S. government converted CHIPS Act grants into an equity stake, acquiring a significant ownership percentage at a discounted price, which increased the total number of outstanding shares and reduced existing shareholders' ownership percentage, according to The Motley Fool and Investing.com. This led to roughly 11% dilution for existing shareholders
geertj · 1h ago
> It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this.
Intel is up 30% pre market on this news so I think the existing shareholders will be fine.
andsoitis · 1h ago
> It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this.
To get money from the outside, you either have to take on debt or you have to give someone a share in the business. In this case, the board of directors concluded the latter is better. I don't understand why you think it is gross.
tasuki · 1h ago
> Nvidia announced that it will buy $5 billion in Intel common stock at $23.28 per share, representing a roughly 5% ownership stake in Intel. (Intel stock is now up 33% in premarket trading.)
Why/how is INTC premarket up from $24.90 around 30% (to $32), when Nvidia is buying the stock at $23.28 ? Who is selling the stock?
I suppose the Intel board decided this? Why did they sell under the current market price? Didn't the Intel board have fiduciary duty to get as good a price from Nvidia as possible? If Nvidia buying stock moves it up so much, it seems like a bad deal to sell the stock for so little.
mtlmtlmtlmtl · 40m ago
It's typical in these situations that the price per stock is negotiated, with current SP as a starting point. It's fairly unusual, I think, for the company selling stock to get a price significantly higher than market price. It's more typical that there's a slight discount. At least that's been the case for every stock I owned where dilution has occured. We also don't know yet when exactly this deal was negotiated and approved, so it's hard to actually say. Considering where INTC has been very recently(below $20), $23.28 seems very reasonable to me.
The reason the stock surged up past $30 is the general market's reaction to the news, and subsequent buying pressure, not the stock transaction itself. It seems likely that once the exuberance cools down, the SP will pull back, where to I can't say. Somewhere between $25 and $30 would be my bet, but this is not financial advice, I'm just spitballing here.
seanalltogether · 1h ago
It feels like the end is in sight for dedicated graphics chips in consumer devices. Phones, consoles, and now Apple silicon are proving that SoC designs with unified memory and focused thermals are a winning strategy for efficiency and speed. Nvidia may be happy enough to move the graphics strategy onto an SoC and keep discrete boards just for AI.
esseph · 36m ago
Yet here I am just frothing for GPUs
pjmlp · 2h ago
So AMD got ATI, and now NVidia gets Intel.
DiskoHexyl · 2h ago
Difference is, AMD wasn't a competitor for ATi. One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs.
These two, on the other hand, are competing in several major product categories. Overall, not a good look
roboror · 5m ago
>One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs.
I mean that also applies to Intel and Nvidia. Intel does make GPUs but their market impact is basically zero.
pjmlp · 1h ago
I doubt we would be seeing Dell selling NVidia ARM CPUs anytime soon.
However I do imagine Intel GPUs, that were never great to start with, might be doomed, long term.
Also another possibility would be, there goes One API, which I doubt many people would care about, given how many rebrands SYSCL already went through.
jfdi · 2h ago
Great news for all involved. It also would seem to validate Apple’s unified architecture for inference, and imply AMD is getting close…
kllrnohj · 1h ago
You mean AMD's unified architecture. They were a founder of the HSA Foundation that drove innovation in this space complete with Linux kernel investments and unified compute SDKs, and they had the first shipping hardware support.
xbar · 36m ago
This is a strong take.
AMD's actual commitment to open innovation over the past ~20 years has been game changing in a lot of segments. It is the aspect of AMD that makes it so much more appealing than intel from a hacker/consumer perspective.
glimshe · 1h ago
Are we getting a new iteration of sub-$200 mini PCs with an RTX chiplet?! That would be an amazing replacement for my N100!
Symmetry · 1h ago
SemiAccruate reported that NVidia had been dipping its toes into manufacturing its products using Intel's fabs several months ago, I'd assume that that's related.
bobajeff · 2h ago
What's the significance of $5B of stock? Does that mean controlling share in Intel?
mr_toad · 1h ago
It’s a corporate engagement ring.
zeograd · 2h ago
Article mentions it amounts to ~5% ownership
iamacyborg · 2h ago
I would assume not given their market cap.
Ozarkian · 2h ago
It's written in the article that the $5B represents about 5% of Intel stock outstanding.
kypro · 2h ago
No, but it's still a big stake from the largest player in semis. You wouldn't expect a move like that if they didn't see an opportunity there.
onlyrealcuzzo · 2h ago
Seems like when Microsoft invested in Apple to keep Apple from going out of business and turning Microsoft into a potential Monopoly.
saejox · 1h ago
I hope this isn't "Shut-up" money to end ARC gpu development. i have an A770, i am very happy with it.
bilekas · 1h ago
It's absolutely not, the ARC line is not a threat in any way to nVidia, it's to get it's feet into the CPU market without the initial setup costs and research it would take to start from scratch.
They will be dominating AMD now on both fronts if things go smoothly for them.
amo1111 · 2h ago
This has been an interesting 1.5 months for Intel on all fronts. I wonder how long this deal was in the making, since the timing is impeccable, looking at the current administration's involvement with Intel.
boxerab · 2h ago
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
aenopix · 18m ago
Capitalism, all at the hands of just a bunch of people.
gdiamos · 1h ago
best news i've heard in days
Sol- · 2h ago
Nowadays I always wonder to what extent such deals are actually driven by market considerations and to what extent it's catering to the Trump administration. Token investments into this state enterprise named Intel seems to be a practical way to cater goodwill with the autocrats.
alex1138 · 1h ago
I know AMD used to be lacking but these days I guess they're probably the go-to on Linux because they share changes with the community
I don't like the idea of using Intel given their lack of disclosure for Spectre/Meltdown and some of their practices (towards AMD)
OrvalWintermute · 1h ago
I'm taking this investment as a validation of the competitiveness of AMD's APUs & Apple's Silicon.
beameup10 · 2h ago
Wasn't Nvidia working on their own CPU design? Will they drop that?
JonChesterfield · 2h ago
They're shipping arm derived cpus and have been for years.
smugma · 1h ago
Give up 0.1% of shares to get 5% of Intel.
Seems to be an easy bet, if for no other reason than to make the US Government (Trump) happy. Trump gets to tout his +30% return on investment.
igtztorrero · 1h ago
This is the first step that Nvidia takes to devour Intel.
jgalt212 · 2h ago
INTC is strategically important company. They won't be allowed to fail. Of course, that doesn't mean the stock is a good investment. During the GFC, all the equity holders were wiped out all the bond holders got all their money back. Figure that one out.
baq · 1h ago
That's quite literally why bonds are bonds and equity is equity...
BoredPositron · 2h ago
So that's probably it for the dedicated Intel GPUs. :/
belter · 26m ago
NVIDIA is Jensen Huang life, and he is probably the best CEO in the USA. But he should be careful. Possible Shareholders lawsuits come with Discovery. NVIDIA sales to Coreweave for example, a company they have shares on is starting to look a lot like self-dealing.
Also, since this Intel deal makes no sense for NVIDIA, a good observer would notice that lately, he seems to spend more time on Air Force One than with NVIDIA teams. The leak of any evidence, showing this was an investment ordered by the White House, will make his company hostage of future demands from the current corrupt administration. The timing is already incredibly suspicions.
We will know for sure he become a hostage, if the next NVIDIA investment is on World Liberty Financial.
The entire AI ecosystem that is being built out looks very suspect frankly..
monkeydust · 3h ago
Precursor to full acquisition perhaps...also maybe Jensen play to Trump a bit in this.
amo1111 · 2h ago
If there’s a time to do it, now would be the time with the current administration looking at all the regulatory blowback.
Panzer04 · 2h ago
If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now. Maybe Intel's future products are garbage and they do worse - but the upside seems pretty high otherwise. This seems like a bit of a firesale price to acquire an advanced fab and CPU maker. Sure, it's Intel and they haven't been doing great, but companies with solid reliable outlooks don't trade this cheaply.
Ofc I would kind of hope/expect antitrust to object given that Intel makes both GPUs and CPUs, and Nvidia is/has dipped their toes into CPU production as well.
fidotron · 2h ago
> If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now.
Intel still has to go through a lot of reorg (i.e. massive cuts) to get to a happy place, and this is what their succession of CEOs have been procrastinating over.
Panzer04 · 39m ago
I recall reading a reddit comment (resounding source, I know) that claimed the reason Intel's e-cores are crushing it is because they actually synthesise them, while the P-cores are a bunch of bespoke circuits bodged together.
One wonders just how bad things must have been internally for that to be the state of one of their core IPs in this day and age...
baq · 1h ago
Judging by my linkedin feed the 'a lot of reorg' is underway.
fidotron · 1h ago
Bluntly, Intel has corporate cancer, and it requires removing the actual cancers, not a sort of 20% haircut.
hvb2 · 2h ago
It would be 100% Trump to have Nvidia buy Intel and then announce how good of an investment decision he made by buying a slice of intel.
USA, where the federal government is picking winners and losers by making risky stock bets with public money.
delfinom · 2h ago
Not even the government at this point. The oligarchs are now in full control of the US and are dividing up their kingdoms. The plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed.
geertj · 1h ago
> The plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed.
This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No gulags will exist and you know it.
mschuster91 · 54m ago
> This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No gulags will exist and you know it.
What about "Alligator Alcatraz", that has been called "concentration camp" [1] (so comparable with a gulag), or where the Korean detainees from the raid on the Hyundai/LG plant ended up, alleging utterly horrible conditions [2]? And there's bound to be more places like the latter, that was most likely just the tip of the iceberg and we only know about the conditions there because the South Korean government raised a huge stink and got the workers out of there.
Okay, Alcatraz 2.0 did get suspended in August to my knowledge, but that's only temporary. It's bound to get the legal issues cleaned up and then be re-opened - or the case makes its way through to the Supreme Court with the same result to be expected.
Those people aren't American citizens, the comparison doesn't fit.
ur-whale · 2h ago
5B is a fairly tiny stake (Intel's market cap is around 120B), other than the "we're now working together" signal, why is this news?
nabla9 · 2h ago
In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department.
As customer they get better access to Intel Foundry and can offload some capacity from TSMC.
voxadam · 1h ago
> In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department.
As I understand it the government's shares are non-voting.
snake42 · 59m ago
The U.S. government won’t have a seat on the board and agreed to vote with Intel’s board on matters requiring shareholder approval “with limited exceptions.”
Ekaros · 1h ago
Isn't 5% somewhat significant chunk? I really wouldn't call it tiny one. Maybe not even small anymore.
glimshe · 1h ago
This is a technology forum first and foremost. I know it might not look that way given the recent flood of political activism articles. But, in the technology field, this is pretty big news. This stake makes Nvidia one of Intel's biggest shareholders.
esseph · 33m ago
There is a good chance this was required by politicians, and is therefore political activism.
:-)
9cb14c1ec0 · 2h ago
It's a good deal for Nvidia, because custom x86 server CPUs have optimization potential for AI computing clusters, which matters now that Nvidia has competitors that they didn't just 2 years ago. I think that the next several years of Nvidia will be ones of fending off growing competition.
They basically baked in a massive investment profit into the deal. When you factor in the stock jump since this announcement, Nvidia has already made billions.
ForHackernews · 2h ago
Who are NVidia's competitors? I thought they were the only game in town when it came to CUDA/AI chips.
re-thc · 2h ago
AMD, Broadcom, Huawei, etc
Panzer04 · 2h ago
tbf, If I were Nvidia and antitrust wasn't an issue I'd be tempted to buy the whole thing.
Intel has a market cap just 2.5% of NVDA, so you could give away just 2.5% of your stock to buy the entirety of Intel. It's bonkers.
euLh7SM5HDFY · 1h ago
If that happened I would expect the same success story as with Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger.
xbar · 32m ago
Why? That is an example of a bad engineering company being acquired and then poisoning the quality of the acquirer with its toxic, low-quality, corporate-politics-above-engineering culture.
There have been a lot of mergers where that has not happened.
amalcon · 2h ago
There are two scenarios here. In one, the AI bubble bursts (so Nvidia is overpriced now) and almost any value stock deal is good for them. In the other, it doesn't, and this gives them a limited hedge against problems with their most critical strategic partner (TSMC).
It looks like a good deal either way and in any amount. But of course I am no expert.
Panzer04 · 40m ago
I suppose the problem is Intel doesn't actually have the fab capacity anyway. They were building it, but that's all on ice now, and probably wasn't close to TSMC anyway, I'd guess.
This all ignores the near complete lack of product out of their advanced processes as well.
iamacyborg · 2h ago
Market cap was closer to 90B before this deal was announced
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1750/...
What’s old is new again: back in 2017, Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discontinue-kaby-lak...
IMHO we will soon see more small/quiet PCs without a slot for a graphics card, relying on integrated graphics. nVidia has no place in that future. But now, by dropping $5B on Intel they can get into some of these SoCs and not become irrelevant.
The nice thing for Intel is that they might be able to claim graphics superiority in SoC land since they are currently lagging in CPU.
/me picturing Khaby Lame gesturing his hands at an obvious workaround.
Doesn't feel the same because the 1997 investment was arranged by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. He had a long personal relationship with Bill Gates so could just call him to drop the outstanding lawsuits and get a commitment for future Office versions on the Mac. Basically, Steve Jobs at relatively young age of 42 was back at Apple in "founder mode" and made bold moves that the prior CEO Gil Amelio couldn't do.
Intel doesn't have the same type of leadership. Their new CEO is a career finance/investor instead of a "new products new innovation" type of leader. This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.
Stinks of Mussolini-style Corporatism to me.
Let's assume Trump admin pressured Nvidia to invest in intel.
Chips act (voted by Democrats / Biden) gave Intel up to $7.8 billion of YOUR money (taxes) in form of direct grants.
Was it more of "Mussolini-style corporatism" to you or not?
https://www.ft.com/content/12adf92d-3e34-428a-8d61-c91695119...
- a bigger R&D budget for their main competitor in the GPU market
- since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.
This is why they built the Grace CPU - noting that they're using Arm's Neoverse V2 cores rather than their own design.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/
Had Apple failed, Microsoft would probably have been found to have a clear monopolistic position. And microsoft was already in hot waters due to InternetExplorer IIRC.
Apples demise wouldve nailed the case.
> Nvidia will also have Intel build custom x86 data center CPUs for its AI products for hyperscale and enterprise customers.
Hell has frozen over at Intel. Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next? Presumably someone over there doesn't want the AI wave to turn into a repeat of their famous success with mobile.
In the event Intel ever do get US based fabrication semi competitive again (and the national security motivation for doing so is intense) nVidia will likely have to be a major customer, so this does make sense. I remain doubtful that Intel can pull it off, and it will have to come from someone else.
They turned down Acorn about the 286, which led to Acorn creating the Arm, they have turned down various console makers, they turned down Apple on the iPhone, and so on. In all cases they thought the opportunities were beneath them.
Intel has always been too much about what they want to sell you, not what you need. That worked for them when the two aligned over backwards compat.
Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.
It leads to mistakes like you mention, where a new market segment or new entrant is not a sure thing. And then it leads to mistakes like Larrabee and Optane where they talk themselves into overconfidence (“obviously this is a great product, we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t guaranteed to make $1B in the first year”).
It is very hard to grow a business with zero risk appetite. You can’t take risky high return bets, and you can’t acknowledge the real risk in “safe” bets.
2010-2011 was also the time that AMD were starting to moan a bit about DX11 and the higher level APIs not being sufficient to get the most out of GPUs, which led to Mantle/Vulkan/DX12 a few years down the road. Intel did a bit regarding massively parallel software rendering, with the flexibility to run on anything x86 and implement features as you liked, or AMD's efforts for 'fusion' (APU+GPU, after recently acquiring ATi) or HSA which I seem to recall was about dispatching different types of computing to the best suited processor(s) in the system for it. However I got the impression a lot of development effort is more interested in progressing on what they already have instead of starting in a new direction, and game studios want to ship finished and stable/predictable product, which is where support from intel would have helped.
The problem is, console manufacturers know precisely how much of their product they anticipate to sell, and it's usually a lot. The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far.
And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to command higher prices and thus higher margins.
> they turned down Apple on the iPhone
Intel just was (and frankly, still is) unable to compete on the power envelope with ARM, that's why you never saw x86 take off on Android as well despite quite a few attempts at it.
Apple only chose to go for Intel with its MacBook line as PowerPC was practically dead and offered no way to extract more performance, and they dropped Intel as soon as their own CPUs were competitive. To get Intel CPUs to the same level of power efficiency that M-series CPUs have would require a full rework of the entire CPU infrastructure and external stack, that would require money that even Intel at its best frankly did not have. And getting x86 to be power effective enough for a phone? Just forget it.
> Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.
Actually, that is surprising for me as well. NVIDIA's Tegra should easily be powerful enough to run the OS for training or inference workload. If I were to guess, NVIDIA wants to avoid getting caught too hard on the "selling AI shovels" train.
This is very likely the new culture that LBT is bringing in. This can only be good.
I agree that Intel would be better served to spin off its fab division, a potential buyer could be the US government for military and national security relevant projects.
They just need to separate business units.
Maybe this changed with the AI race but there are plenty of people buying older chips by the millions for all sorts of products.
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...
Intel was well on its way to be a considerable threat to NVIDIA with their Arc line of GPUs, which are getting better and cheaper with each generation. Perhaps not in the enterprise and AI markets yet, but certainly on the consumer side.
This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both Intel and for consumers. Intel is only helping NVIDIA, which puts them further away from unseating them than they were before.
Competition is always a net positive for consumers, while mergers are always a net negative. This news will only benefit shareholders of both companies, and Intel shareholders only in the short-term. In the long-term, it's making NVIDIA more powerful.
Intel's foundry costs are probably competitive with nvidia too - nvidia has too much opportunity cost if nothing else.
I think this partnership will damage nvidia. It might damage intel, but given they're circling the drain already, it's hard to make matters worse.
It's probably bad for consumers in every dimension.
Or to take the opposite, if nvidia rolled over intel and fired essentially everyone in the management chain and started trying to run the fabs themselves, good chance they'd turn the ship around and become even more powerful than they already are.
How was Intel "circling the drain"?
They have a very competitive offering of CPUs, APUs, and GPUs, and the upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake architectures are very promising. Their products compete with AMD, NVIDIA, and ARM SoCs from the likes of Apple.
Intel may have been in a rut years ago, but they've recovered incredibly well.
This is why I'm puzzled by this decision, and as a consumer, I would rather use a fully Intel system than some bastardized version that also involves NVIDIA. We've seen how well that works with Optimus.
Also their network cards no longer work properly which is deeply aggravating as that used to be something I could rely on, just bought some realtek ones to work around the intel ones falling over.
Some would say that's circling the drain.
Intel isn’t at that point, but the companies trajectory isn’t looking good. I’d happily sacrifice ARC to keep a duopoly in CPU’s.
Consumers still have AMD as an alternative for very decent and price attractive GPUs (and CPUs).
[0]: <https://www.fudzilla.com/6882-nvidia-continues-comic-campaig...>
Looks like using GPU IP to take over other brands' product lines is now officially an nVidia strategy.
I guess the obvious worry here is whether Intel will continue development of their own dGPUs, which have a lovely open driver stack.
They wanted to launch DGX Spark early summer and it's nowhere to be seen.
So long as the AI craze is hanging in there it feels like having that expertise and IP is going to have high potential upside.
Would be foolish to throw that away now that they're finally getting closer to "a product someone may want to buy" with things like B50 and B60.
5 Billion is just a start but this is a gift for nVidia to eventually squire intel.
Intel has never been so cheap relative to the kinds of IP assets that Nvidia values and probably will not be ever again if this and other investments keep it afloat.
Trump's FTC would not block.
You write with proper case-sensitivity for their titles which suggests some historic knowledge of the two. They have been very close partners on CPU+GPU for decades. This investment is not fundamentally changing that.
The current CEO is more like a CFO--cutting costs and eliminating waste. There are two exits from that: sell off, as you say, and re-investment in the products of most likely future profit. This could be a signal that the latter is the plan and that the competitive aspects of the nVidia-intel partnership will be sidelined for a while.
Erm, a rather important point to bury down the story. The fiest question on anyone’s lips will be is this $5bn to build new chip technology, or $5bn for employees to spend on yachts?
> Intel stock experienced dilution because the U.S. government converted CHIPS Act grants into an equity stake, acquiring a significant ownership percentage at a discounted price, which increased the total number of outstanding shares and reduced existing shareholders' ownership percentage, according to The Motley Fool and Investing.com. This led to roughly 11% dilution for existing shareholders
Intel is up 30% pre market on this news so I think the existing shareholders will be fine.
To get money from the outside, you either have to take on debt or you have to give someone a share in the business. In this case, the board of directors concluded the latter is better. I don't understand why you think it is gross.
Why/how is INTC premarket up from $24.90 around 30% (to $32), when Nvidia is buying the stock at $23.28 ? Who is selling the stock?
I suppose the Intel board decided this? Why did they sell under the current market price? Didn't the Intel board have fiduciary duty to get as good a price from Nvidia as possible? If Nvidia buying stock moves it up so much, it seems like a bad deal to sell the stock for so little.
The reason the stock surged up past $30 is the general market's reaction to the news, and subsequent buying pressure, not the stock transaction itself. It seems likely that once the exuberance cools down, the SP will pull back, where to I can't say. Somewhere between $25 and $30 would be my bet, but this is not financial advice, I'm just spitballing here.
I mean that also applies to Intel and Nvidia. Intel does make GPUs but their market impact is basically zero.
However I do imagine Intel GPUs, that were never great to start with, might be doomed, long term.
Also another possibility would be, there goes One API, which I doubt many people would care about, given how many rebrands SYSCL already went through.
AMD's actual commitment to open innovation over the past ~20 years has been game changing in a lot of segments. It is the aspect of AMD that makes it so much more appealing than intel from a hacker/consumer perspective.
They will be dominating AMD now on both fronts if things go smoothly for them.
I don't like the idea of using Intel given their lack of disclosure for Spectre/Meltdown and some of their practices (towards AMD)
Seems to be an easy bet, if for no other reason than to make the US Government (Trump) happy. Trump gets to tout his +30% return on investment.
Also, since this Intel deal makes no sense for NVIDIA, a good observer would notice that lately, he seems to spend more time on Air Force One than with NVIDIA teams. The leak of any evidence, showing this was an investment ordered by the White House, will make his company hostage of future demands from the current corrupt administration. The timing is already incredibly suspicions.
We will know for sure he become a hostage, if the next NVIDIA investment is on World Liberty Financial.
"Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/trump-uae-chi...
Ofc I would kind of hope/expect antitrust to object given that Intel makes both GPUs and CPUs, and Nvidia is/has dipped their toes into CPU production as well.
Intel still has to go through a lot of reorg (i.e. massive cuts) to get to a happy place, and this is what their succession of CEOs have been procrastinating over.
One wonders just how bad things must have been internally for that to be the state of one of their core IPs in this day and age...
USA, where the federal government is picking winners and losers by making risky stock bets with public money.
This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No gulags will exist and you know it.
What about "Alligator Alcatraz", that has been called "concentration camp" [1] (so comparable with a gulag), or where the Korean detainees from the raid on the Hyundai/LG plant ended up, alleging utterly horrible conditions [2]? And there's bound to be more places like the latter, that was most likely just the tip of the iceberg and we only know about the conditions there because the South Korean government raised a huge stink and got the workers out of there.
Okay, Alcatraz 2.0 did get suspended in August to my knowledge, but that's only temporary. It's bound to get the legal issues cleaned up and then be re-opened - or the case makes its way through to the Supreme Court with the same result to be expected.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/197508/alligator-alcatraz-tr...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07v1j98ydvo
As customer they get better access to Intel Foundry and can offload some capacity from TSMC.
As I understand it the government's shares are non-voting.
:-)
They basically baked in a massive investment profit into the deal. When you factor in the stock jump since this announcement, Nvidia has already made billions.
Intel has a market cap just 2.5% of NVDA, so you could give away just 2.5% of your stock to buy the entirety of Intel. It's bonkers.
There have been a lot of mergers where that has not happened.
It looks like a good deal either way and in any amount. But of course I am no expert.
This all ignores the near complete lack of product out of their advanced processes as well.