Intel Foundry sells supply chain diversity as TSMC's AI revenue keeps Taiwan central

For chip buyers and governments, the question is whether capacity outside Taiwan can scale fast enough to matter. TSMC's revenue and its high-performance computing share show how much AI demand still runs through the island. Intel is selling geographic diversity.

Sovereign AI makes diversification a sales pitch

Power delivery, connectivity, advanced packaging and supply chain resilience are emerging as the primary constraints on AI scaling, the Intel Foundry article said.

The sales argument follows from that. Intel Foundry says it keeps production in North America, Europe and Asia. That gives customers a choice of where their products are built. The company frames that footprint as flexibility for customers weighing business continuity and national security needs. Robin Saxby, Arm's founding chief executive, said design and manufacturing were inherently global during his career at ES2 and Arm. In an EE Times interview, he said today's leaders face localised legislation and geopolitical tension, including the CHIPS Acts.

TSMC's numbers show the pull of Taiwan

TSMC's numbers explain why that pitch is hard to answer quickly.

The same report said high-performance computing's share rose from 57% a year earlier. Advanced processes took 79% of wafer revenue. Intel's quarter ran at a different scale and speed. Revenue rose 21% to $16.5 billion. The Data Center and AI division rose 78% to $7.3 billion. The PC business fell 5%.

The same report lists TSMC's geographic concentration in Taiwan, amid geopolitical tension, as a risk.

A Financial Express review describes Taiwan as the centre of advanced chip manufacturing. It says any serious disruption to that ecosystem would hit industries, economies and strategic calculations far beyond electronics.

Why a second source is hard to build

No country controls the entire chip chain, the same review notes.

The Financial Express review of Rakesh Kumar's The Chip Age splits the industry by strength. The US leads in design and equipment, Taiwan in advanced manufacturing, South Korea in memory, Japan in materials, and the Netherlands, through ASML, in lithography. SemiEngineering adds a technical reason the split is getting harder to unpick. Innovation has shifted from the system-on-chip model to a system of chips: chiplets, memory stacks and accelerators in one package, with advanced packaging on the critical path. Saxby made a related point about people. Modern silicon design is hyper-complex, 3D and multi-variable, he said. Success depends on balanced, specialised teams rather than one engineer mastering the stack.

Intel's answer on the process side is 18A, which uses RibbonFET gate-all-around transistors. It also uses PowerVia, a backside power delivery scheme that routes power through the back of the wafer, cutting resistance and voltage drop.

What to watch

The foundry industry increasingly views agentic AI and physical AI as significant long-term growth drivers, the Intel Foundry article said.

Saxby put the planning problem plainly in the EE Times interview.

Unfortunately for any CEO today, making decisions long-term, like investments and so on, is a lot more difficult than when I was a CEO.

What neither company has said is what a second source outside Taiwan would cost, or how quickly buyers would pay for it.