Chen Liwu’s first order landed after taking office: Intel foundry won order for tower chips
Intel, a well-known American semiconductor company, announced on Tuesday that it has reached a strategic cooperation with network security company Fortinet Information to jointly develop Fortinet’s next-generation security chip SP6. Public information shows that this cooperation is also the first time that Intel’s foundry business has confirmed signing contracts with external corporate customers since Chen Liwu, the current head of Intel, took office in March last year. According to relevant sources at Intel, the SP6 chip will be manufactured using the Intel 4 process.
Intel, a well-known American semiconductor company, announced on Tuesday that it has reached a strategic cooperation with network security company Fortinet Information to jointly develop Fortinet’s next-generation security chip SP6. Public information shows that this cooperation is also the first time that Intel’s foundry business has confirmed signing contracts with external corporate customers since Chen Liwu, the current head of Intel, took office in March last year. According to relevant sources at Intel, the SP6 chip will be manufactured using the Intel 4 process. Compared with Intel's most advanced 18A (1.8 nanometer) process, "Intel 4" is essentially a 7-nanometer process, which is already a previous generation technology and is mainly used for ASIC and other chips that are cost-sensitive and have less extreme performance requirements. Although Fortinet Information is not as well-known as Apple and Tesla, the company is on a booming track as the AI era stimulates demand for network security. Since the beginning of this year, Fortinet Information’s share price has risen nearly 100%. (Daily chart of Feita Information, source: TradingView) For many years, Fortinet Information has been designing dedicated ASIC chips to comply with security-related business processes while significantly reducing power consumption. Since the FortiSP5 chip is likely to be manufactured using TSMC's 7nm process, Intel has also grabbed a customer from the industry leader. More importantly, this is also an important signal that Intel's foundry business is on the right track. The company's annual report for fiscal year 2025 shows that the revenue of the foundry business in the past two fiscal years has been around US$17 billion, and operating losses have exceeded US$10 billion. (Source: Intel Annual Report) Compared with the losses caused by investing in building factories, the bigger problem is that most of the income from Intel's foundry business comes from Intel itself. The company's financial report disclosed that between fiscal year 2023 and 2025, foundry, assembly and testing revenue from external customers were only US$547, 159 and 307 million respectively. It is reported that among the company's few external customer revenue, a large part comes from the U.S. government's defense-specific chip production orders. For Chen Liwu, he needs to prove that Intel's foundry business can eventually compete with TSMC and Samsung Electronics. In April this year, Intel announced that it would cooperate with Google to design an ASIC called "Infrastructure Processing Unit". The company is also involved in assisting the world's richest man, Elon Musk, in his vision to build a Terafab chip factory. There are also rumors that in response to TSMC's CoWoS capacity shortage, cloud service giants such as Google and Meta are actively approaching Intel and plan to introduce Intel's EMIB packaging technology. In addition, U.S. President Trump said in June this year that Apple would manufacture chips with Intel in the United States, but the two companies have not yet confirmed the deal. The U.S. government acquired a 10% stake in Intel in August last year. Since then, Trump has repeatedly asked U.S. technology companies to take care of businesses that are key holdings of the White House.