When Lip-Bu Tan came to Intel last year, he considered stopping the promotion of the company's 18A (1.8nm-class) fabrication technology among potential external customers and making it yet another internal-only node, as he did not believe the manufacturing process made a lot of sense for external clients. Less than a year later, he seems to have changed his mind about the prospects of the fabrication process to a large degree because some external customers expressed interest in 18A-P, a performance-enhanced version of 18A. Yet, Intel admits that 18A continues to suffer from process variability.
"While Lip-Bu was, I think, thinking that we probably should focus on 14A as a foundry node and make 18A really just an internal node, now that we have seen some real progress there, I think he is now starting to recognize that this is actually a good node to offer to external customers as well," said David Zinsner, chief financial officer of Intel, Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2026. "We have been getting some kind of inbound interest in 18A-P as a foundry node. So, I think that is pretty positive."
