Intel to Drop $14 Billion on TSMC 3nm Wafers in 2024 and 2025: Analyst

Intel has always been in competition with TSMC for foundry bragging rights, and it's a battle Intel famously lost a few years ago as it struggled to move beyond 14nm. However, Intel has made considerable strides in recapturing its former glory. It has also begun tapping the Taiwanese powerhouse to make chips for its CPU and GPUs, proving it's not beyond asking for help when needed. Now, the company is preparing to invest heavily in TSMC's 3nm technology for its future products, according to a new report from a semiconductor industry analyst.

The report was prepared by Andrew Lu and posted in a Chinese WeChat, according to EEnews (via Tom's Hardware). It states Intel will drop $4 billion in 2024 on 3nm wafers and follow that up with a $10 billion expenditure in 2025. The analyst says this outlay will make Intel the second biggest customer of TSMC, behind Apple but ahead of AMD. The analysis might confirm a previous report that Intel would use TSMC to make the CPU cores of its upcoming Lunar Lake architecture. One of the previously leaked slides states Lunar Lake will feature "N3B CPUs," with N3B being the baseline version or what Apple's using currently.

These leaked slides showing Intel's future plans first appeared on Twitter but were quickly deleted. Credit: Anandtech Forums/Twitter

However, the new report doesn't confirm that; it only states Intel is buying "chips" from TSMC, which doesn't necessarily mean the CPU cores. For example, Intel uses TSMC to make three of the four tiles on its upcoming Meteor Lake processors, but Intel still makes the actual CPU cores. TSMC is making the I/O, GPU, and SoC tiles on Meteor Lake using both 5nm and 6nm nodes, so it wouldn't be surprising to see that effort continue on future chips. The analyst says it's unclear which tiles will be made by TSMC compared with Intel, so we can't assume Intel is giving up on CPU fabbing duties just yet. Lunar Lake might be a one-off experiment as the company moves onto its sub-5nm processes, such as Intel 20A and 18A, due in 2024.

The report states Intel is expected to purchase 15,000 3nm wafers per month by the end of 2024, doubling in 2025 to 30,000 wafers a month. These 3nm wafers will be used for all sorts of Intel products, including its Battlemage GPUs, tiles for next-generation CPU architectures, and even its data center products.

Lunar Lake is expected to be a low-power, mobile-only successor to Meteor Lake for systems ranging from 8W to 30W. It will reportedly be the company's first mobile architecture with embedded memory, similar to Apple's M-series SoCs, which TSMC also makes. It's supposed to arrive in late 2024, so we'll have to wait another year to see what Intel has planned for these TSMC wafers.