Nvidia is considering using Intel’s new foundry business to build chips, but any partnership will take time to cement, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“They’re interested in us using their foundries. We’re very interested in exploring it,” Huang said of Intel during a press conference on Wednesday.
Intel’s foundry business was only announced a year ago. So any partnership would probably occur years from now when the foundry’s manufacturing technologies become more competitive with rivals TSMC and Samsung.
“Foundry discussions take a long time,” Huang added. “Our partnerships with TSMC and Samsung in the last several years is something that took years to cultivate.”
Huang also suggested Intel will first have to prove it can hang with the leading players before Nvidia commits to tapping the company’s foundry service. “Being a foundry at the caliber of TSMC is not for the faint of heart,” he said.
“TSMC dances with the operations of what? Three hundred companies worldwide?” Huang added. “Our own operation is quite an orchestra. And they dance with us. Then there’s another orchestra that they dance with. So the ability to dance with all these operations teams, supply chain teams, is not for the faint of heart.”
In the meantime, Nvidia’s CEO said the company has already expanded its “supply base probably by four folds over the last two years” to help it meet customer demand during the ongoing chip shortage. The company previously said it expects its chip supplies to significantly improve in Q2.
“We’ve qualified more substrate vendors, more assembly vendors, more system integration partners, we’ve second-sourced and qualified a whole bunch more external components,” he said.
At the same time, Intel is also becoming a direct competitor to Nvidia in the graphics sector. Next week, Intel will launch its first dedicated gaming GPUs for laptops. Then in Q2, it’ll launch the company’s first gaming desktop graphics cards in over 20 years.
However, Jensen said he had no problems sharing chip designs with Intel’s foundry services, even with the competition. He pointed out that it’s common for tech companies to share product details with each other, given that many hardware systems work with components from multiple vendors.
“We’ve been working closely with Intel, sharing with them our roadmaps long before we’ve shared with the public, for years,” Huang said. “Intel has known our secret for years.”
