And no, you haven’t forgotten about a line of Intel-made Roombas. It requested permission to make hardware changes to the “Automatic Guided Vehicles” it’s used in semiconductor facilities for two decades. It says replacing the machines could take years, and there are no domestic alternatives. The FCC agreed, giving it permission to update its bots for the next year.
A suspected gas cylinder explosion at Intel’s Kiryat Gat facility in southern Israel, where it makes its most advanced chips, has killed two workers and injured a third. JPost and CTech report that police believe a gas cylinder malfunctioned while trucks were loading material into tanks, causing serious burns to the victims and a leak of nitrogen trifluoride (NF₃).
We’ve written about the risks fab workers face, including the death of a truck driver in 2024 while transporting sulfuric acid waste at TSMC’s Arizona facility, and an Intel employee who worried cost-cutting and downsizing were adding extra risk.
Microsoft’s DLSS competitor isn’t just for Qualcomm laptops and Xbox Ally X anymore — the MSI Claw EX handheld and anything else Intel Core Ultra Series 3 should now qualify. Microsoft claims it’s enough to play at ultra instead of high, among other examples, and I see the hard-to-find Claw EX is now back in stock at B&H, MSI, and ExcaliberPC.
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[DirectX Developer Blog]
A Reuters report claims SK Hynix is considering leasing part of Intel’s Ohio chip factory or forming a venture with Intel and other companies.
However, SK Hynix says “nothing has been finalized regarding cooperation with any specific companies mentioned in the article,” while Reuters notes any deal to produce HBM or DRAM chips may face opposition from South Korea’s government.
The massive $16.8 billion chip facility, which is being built by Tesla and SpaceX with help from Intel, will be located in Grimes County, population 29,268. After securing over a billion dollars in tax breaks from two rural school districts, SpaceX says it will break ground later this year. The fab will supply AI chips to power Musk’s plans to build a “robot army” that includes self-driving cars and humanoid robots, as well as for the data centers he plans on launching into space.
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The Framework Laptop 13 Pro has it all. But RAMageddon spiked its price.
The partially government-owned chipmaker’s Q2 2026 revenue increased 25 percent from last year, with data center and AI revenue up 59 percent. CEO Lip-Bu Tan:
AI is driving unprecedented demand for compute, and as we continue to execute, Intel is well-positioned to capture sustainable growth across our CPU franchise, ASICs, advanced packaging and vast wafer foundry network […] Our Q2 results represent our strongest revenue growth in more than fifteen years, enabled by greater speed, accountability, and customer focus.
Intel has put chips in many a spacecraft. Until 2012, the International Space Station had 16MHz Intel 8086 chips as its primary brains, then received an “EPIC” upgrade to 266MHz Intel Pentium. Now, Intel is publicly marketing cut-down Panther Lake chips for private space industry too.
Following capacity shortages at TSMC, Intel will “manufacture more than three million Tensor Processing Units in 2028,” half the estimated 6 million TPUs Google’s expected to make in the next two years, The Information reports. Nvidia and SK Hynix are also reportedly testing Intel’s tech for manufacturing their chips.
[The Information]
It was reported last week that Intel and Apple struck a deal for unknown chips. Now supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports Intel is manufacturing “low-end/legacy” chips for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, the majority for the phones. The scale is small though, with TSMC set to retain 90 percent of Apple’s chip supply.
It seems that x86 hardware will be part of Google’s new laptop platform, although Intel doesn’t specify what processors it’ll be using:
We’re thrilled to partner with @Google on something we’ve been building with them - Googlebook. Premium, powerful devices designed for Intelligence. We can’t wait to get it into your hands this fall.
Googlebook is also expected to support ARM-based chipsets from other vendors, so perhaps the partnership isn’t exclusive.
Data center sales are now “the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth,” according to CEO Lisa Su. AI agents are increasing demands for CPUs, and AMD and Intel’s x86 industry group recently announced a new instruction set, AI Compute Extensions (ACE), to help close the performance gap with GPUs.
Its client and gaming revenue grew 23 percent to $3.6 billion despite lower “semi-custom revenue” for devices like game consoles.
[Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.]
Bloomberg reports that Apple has held “exploratory discussions” with the chipmakers to produce the main processors for certain devices in the US, though the Cupertino company still has concerns about using non-TSMC technology. Perhaps Intel really will return to Macs next year?
Intel is announcing its new Arc Pro B70 “Big Battlemage” desktop GPU with 32GB of VRAM and up to 32 Xe2 cores. It costs $949 for an Intel reference design, while partner designed cards will vary in price. There’s also a B65 Pro with 20 Xe2 cores, but it’s only made by partners.
Check out the full specs below. Gaming-focused versions of these cards sure would sound swell.
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Asus made all the right tweaks, and the new Panther Lake chip delivers.
The first chip of Intel’s 18A process is speedy, even on battery power. And it’s a solid option for 1080p gaming.
During an earnings call on Thursday, Intel CFO David Zisner says the company was “relatively aggressive in terms of getting memory” ahead of the global shortage for its previous-gen Lunar Lake chips, which come with integrated RAM.
The company doesn’t have to worry about securing memory for its new Panther Lake laptop processors after Intel ditched the built-in memory design.
The chipmaker’s Q4 2025 earnings report reveals that it earned $13.7 billion in revenue over the past few months, a dip from the $14.3 billion it made at the same time last year.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is “working aggressively to grow supply” of chips built on its 18A process, including its new Panther Lake laptop CPUs.
In the spring, Reuters broke the news that Nvidia and Broadcom were testing Intel’s 18A process for chip production, but in a profile today of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, the outlet now says Nvidia’s test has ended, regardless of their new $5 billion deal.
The report doesn’t say why, but in October, Intel CFO David Zinsner said 18A yields were “not where we need them to be to drive the appropriate level of margins,” and that it could be 2026 or 2027 before that changes.
Two revolving doors in a single press release? Robin Colwell, an economic advisor during both Trump terms (and a lobbyist between them) is now Intel’s SVP of Government Affairs, after Trump shook down Intel for 10 percent. Annie Weckesser is now SVP of marketing and communications — she was CMO at SambaNova, a AI chip startup that Intel’s reportedly about to buy.
Back in the mists of time, in ancient 2009, the European Union fined Intel €1.06 billion ($1.2 billion) for anticompetitive behaviors. The two have been in court ever since, and after Intel got the fine cut to €376 million, it’s now dropped again to €237.1 million ($275 million). How low can it go?
