Great. Welcome back. I'm Joe Moore, Morgan Stanley Semiconductor Research. Very happy to have with us today, the CFO of Intel, Dave Zinsner. So quickly, I want to read this, which you guys have heard before. For important disclosures, please see Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales rep. That's I think this is my 19th fireside, so I've had to read that a few too many times.
I'll blur it together.
Anyway, so maybe if we could just start, you know, you've been you and Pat together for, you know, almost three years now. Can you kind of talk about Intel's priorities, where, how you're doing, where you are? And we'll go in detail on all of it, but.
Yeah. Sounds good.
You know, I actually probably should, like, say the disclosures too for Intel. You know, I might make forward-looking statements. You know, consult the risk factors and the 10-Q and 10-K, and I'll mostly be talking about non-GAAP numbers. So there's a reconciliation to GAAP on the Investor Relations website. Yeah. So actually, I've only been there two years. Pat's been there three. I came in a year after Pat, basically. And I think, you know, it's, you know, transformations are hard, obviously. They take a while. And, you know, I think when I think about Intel, I think there are really three things we're trying to do. Number one is, you know, get the core business into a good place. The second is to stand up the foundry business.
The third is to attack, you know, what is a kind of exciting and growing market in AI. I think on the core side of the business, you know, things are going extremely well. You know, most of that was around the 5 getting 5 nodes in 4 years. You know, we're largely through Intel 4 now. Intel 3 is, you know, not too far away now at this point with Sierra Forest, which will qualify in the first half of this year. And then we've got 20A and 18A coming. And both of those look pretty good. So I think, you know, we're in a good place on the process side. And the product side is starting to, you know, execute well. I think the teams are starting to execute on the products.
They're beating their milestones in most cases as opposed to missing them, significantly, which they had been doing in the past. So I think that part of it is going well. And you see kind of that showing up in, you know, the market share data. It looks good on the client side in particular. You know, we're still kind of working our way through on the data center side. But that has, you know, stabilized, as of the fourth quarter. And I think we'll largely see that stable through this year. And then as, you know, newer products come out, I think we can make improvements on that. So core business, you know, get that into a good place. I think we're there at this point. The second piece is standing up the foundry. You know, that one is going to take a while, obviously.
But I think a lot of the pieces of that puzzle are now starting to get assembled. You know, the node, the process, five nodes in four years aspect of this, like I said, is largely on track. Pat, I think, well, last, like, two weeks ago, whenever we had the Foundry Day, he mentioned that we have $15 billion of lifetime deal value. So, you know, deals are starting to get inked here. I think we have most of the top 20 customers on the foundry side, running test chips with us. So, you know, we look like we're in a good place as it relates to getting a pipeline. Then, you know, we're also making good progress on the packaging side. So I think that part of the business is going well. It takes longer, obviously. It takes multiple quarters to get packaging wins.
And that shows up in revenue. It takes multiple years for you to get wafer wins. And that shows up in revenue. So, you know, there's a time lag. But, you know, all the things that we wanted to see in terms of milestones, I think we've largely executed upon. The one that's probably, you know, in the more nascent space is the AI part of the story. We have the Gaudi products that address the, you know, the data center space. And, you know, the pipeline is increasing. But we've got to translate that to revenue. And, you know, we largely have not yet done that in a significant enough fashion. So more to more work to go on that side. But we do think that AI has, you know, a broader exposure to it, both in terms of the PC space and at the edge.
And I think we've got we have good positions in those areas and are probably more ahead, relative to competitors in that area. So, you know, I think I give myself or give ourselves, I guess, you know, kind of a B in terms of the transformation. Not everything has gone well. But most of it is going, largely according to plan. It's just, you know, these kind of things just take time.
Yeah. You know, you mentioned transition transformations are hard. And you've certainly done a lot here. Maybe if I could just ask about this broader ambition to do, you know, IDM and foundry together and not to rehash, you know, multiple-year-old debates. But to me, you can add value through manufacturing the way you did 10 years ago, which is to make the best-in-class microprocessor transistor. And you made really good product. I didn't think at that time you were particularly competitive with foundry because the wafer costs were very high. And then the company sort of tried to address that with the super ambitious 10-nanometer. And we know how that went. So, like, is there sort of that level of, can I make the best microprocessors? And then there's another level, which is, can I compete with the best foundries in the world?
Is there a risk that trying to do the second one kind of makes the first one harder?
Yeah. Well, I think, like, there's a confluence of things that I think drive us to want to be in the foundry business. Number one is, it's a lot more expensive to build a fab that's an EUV fab than it was to do a pre-EUV fab. And it requires a fair amount of wafer volume to get your return on one of those fabs. And I think it's unlikely that we would have enough volume ourselves to be able to fill the fabs to the level that drives enough of an ROI. So part of it is just necessity. We need more volume. And, you know, that's going to come have to come from other customers. I think that's number one. Number two is, you know, things are coming at us in a way that's actually fairly advantageous.
You know, the need now and the recognition of how important leading-edge process technology is to the world, I think, has been recognized now over the last couple of years. And so, you know, governments are now looking for opportunities to see, you know, production done outside of Southeast Asia. And so, you know, that also helps. Because now the other factor that kind of inhibited you from being able to do it was, it was fairly expensive to do one of these fabs in the U.S. or in Europe. You know, now with the help and the assistance of governments, that can happen. You know, we have the ability to drive a cost structure that would make sense. I think also, when you look at our position now, you know, we're now in a space where we're going to be competitive on the leading-edge process technology.
But having a multiple-year lead is probably not something we can sustain. And I think when you make that transition, you need to suddenly be thinking about, OK, we can't just bring out the best transistor at any cost and it all make sense for us. Now, we do actually have to drive real efficiency. And so part of the benefits of being in the foundry space is, you get a lot of feedback from your customers. That helps you make, yes, better transistors, but also better transistors at very effective costs. You know, the one thing I would just say is, and we get this question a lot, is, OK, well, you know, the profitability and the cost structure of the leading competitor in this space is significant. You know, how do you get there? And I think it's probably the wrong way to think about it.
Because I don't think we are looking to try to get to that level. You know, we can be profitable, meaningfully profitable in the foundry space, be well underneath what the leading player in the space is, and still drive significant profitability for the overall Intel company. Because we get the margin stacking benefit in at least the part of the business that we sell into our own, you know, fabless portion of our business. So that's really the way I kind of think about it. And, you know, I think the last piece of this is kind of restructuring how we manage the business. So we look at the entire manufacturing and TD footprint as a separate P&L and kind of manage the company accordingly to that.
I think we'll start to see a lot of the efficiencies that we think we can yield and get ourselves more competitive from a cost structure from managing the business in that way.
We're, I guess, a month away from seeing what those numbers look like once you start to break out the profitability of the foundry organization separately. But it seems like the expectation is that, you know, you're sort of a little subscale in that part of the business. And so the earnings almost kind of shift to the product groups a little bit. Because you'll have foundry, you know, struggling a little bit profitability-wise. And you'll have the. Is that kind of the right way to?
Yeah. So one thing, on April 2nd, we're going to do a webinar. Pat and I are going to do a webinar. We're going to issue an 8-K that gives historical perspective on how these businesses look, you know, in the new way we'll segment the business. And there's a lot there to take, I think. So for investors, we thought it would be a good idea to kind of walk everyone through it and show what the opportunity is. So we'll do that on April 2nd. And it will be me and Pat. And we'll do some sort of webinar and then do some Q&A. And you'll probably have an opportunity to ask questions. I'm sure you'll have it. It's the right way to look at it.
I would tell you, the foundry, you know, if our margins are in the kind of mid-40s space, call it roughly, and the product, call it the fabless part of our business, the products are, you know, kind of north of 50, and we get margin stacking, then it kind of tells you that the foundry part of the business is, you know, in a pretty challenged state in terms of profitability. And partly, that's, you know, scale. Partly, that's we have a big, relatively decent-sized footprint that's more than, you know, we were set up to need. So we're under, you know, kind of underloaded in a sense. And that's hurting us a bit.
But a lot of it is just, we have older wafers that don't generate the revenue or the profitability that, as we transition to leading-edge wafers that have good cost structure and also command better pricing, you'll see a pretty big lift in terms of the profitability of the business. But the one other point, which I think kind of you're making, is, the product business actually has good profitability. You know, it is a good business.
Better than we see at the overall UPS line, yeah.
And better than you see now. Because we take a whole bunch of cost from the factories. And we just, you know, right now, the way we're allocating is just spreading it through those businesses. So they kind of artificially look lower than they really are. Once you kind of say, OK, look at them as a fabless company that's buying wafers from a factory, in this case, the Intel factory, then you notice that, hey, the profitability is more closely aligned to what you see in fabless companies.
So in a way, the worse IFS is, the better, except that it says there's a lot of movement.
Exactly. But I would say, you know, if you can't, you know, this is a glass-half-full kind of way to look at the foundry thing. But because you look at it and you see the challenge of the financials and you know the kind of position they're in in terms of, you know, the age of the technologies that are getting shipped in terms of wafers, the fact that the cost structure has never been a big focus of that part of the business, the opportunity to improve it is pretty significant. And if you can just move that to something that is reasonable, I'm not talking about, like, you know, leading-edge players' profitability, which is a reasonable profitability, it's a significant tailwind to the earnings of the company.
Great. That makes sense. So maybe talk about 5 nodes in 4 years, you know, which was, again, you were pretty far behind when that started. And so you gave us multiple milestones to assess, a lot of enthusiasm from you guys on the progress of that. And, you know, a lot of the productization is still to come, right? Because you're sort of two and a half years into that. And we only have 7 and 4 that are out in product. So, you know, but in quick succession, we get 3, 20A, and then 18A. You know, can you just talk about where that confidence is coming from at how good the 18A process will be?
Yeah. I think, you know, when Pat when I joined, was it January of 2022, Pat mentioned this 5 nodes in 4 years. And I had just come from Micron, who had done, like, a node a year. And that was, like, breakneck speed. And I thought, 5 nodes in 4 years? Oh my god, that is fast. I almost thought, we will never get there. But it's a good kind of aspirational goal. But, you know, to the credit of the team, I think they've done a very good job executing on these processes. Partly, they got the benefit of, you know, because the leaders are out in front a bit, it allows that, you know, catching up is a little easier than blazing the trail. And so that has helped, I think, a bit in terms of getting us to where we are.
Then secondly, you know, yes, we missed this EUV thing. And that set us back. But largely, this is a good, really good team, you know, the TD team. So, you know, once we got readjusted to fixing that, you know, their ability to execute is actually quite, quite, quite good. Yeah, as you mentioned, Intel 4 is now out with Meteor Lake. And that's, you know, already ramping and shipping. So, you know, we can check the box, really, on that one. And Sierra Forest will qual by the end of the first half of this year. And that's the first Intel 3 product. So pretty much check the box on that one. So what we have left is 20A and 18A, which are kind of like cousin nodes, I'd call it.
You know, what's been good about 18A, which has been different probably than any other process Intel's probably ever done, is, we're getting a ton of feedback from customers outside of our own design teams on the node and helping us kind of improve upon it. So I think all things look really solid. They've hit or beaten every milestone that we put forward on 18A. So I suspect Clearwater Forest will be our first product. I think, you know, we'll meet or beat the time frame for that one. Then we're on to the more leading-edge nodes that Ann unveiled at Direct Connect the other day.
Yeah. It's also become increasingly evident that this backside power is a big deal and that it's something that people want. Can you talk about what that may look like from a foundry standpoint in the sense of, you know, we've talked to some of your big potential customers? When we saw, you know, for example, we saw a lot of this when people moved to Samsung, is that we give something small to make sure they can execute on something? Then they give them something bigger in the next wave. Is that how you see this proceeding?
In other words, customers will give you small volumes.
Yeah, give you a small project group concept or a big project group.
We probably won't win anybody's major volume in 18A. We'll win some smaller SKUs. That's all we need, to be honest with you. That will be very significant to us, even though it seems maybe marginal in the marketplace, particularly if we can collect enough of these customers. Backside power, you know, this combination of gate-all-around, what we call RibbonFET, and the backside power, which we call PowerVia, both of those will be part of the 18A solution, which really makes it, I think, a really compelling offering. And what we've seen a lot is that what does that mean? This one's not working. Is this working? Oh, yeah. OK. What we've seen a lot is that, you know, when it comes to, like, the high-performance compute part of the market, that's really where we're starting to see a lot of our uptake.
You know, the particular aspects of 18A with PowerVia and RibbonFET, combined with our just legacy of experience on high-performance compute, I think makes us a really compelling partner for customers that are in that space and want to develop products.
Great. Maybe we could shift and talk a little bit about, you know, the nearer term, 2024. In Q1, you described kind of a seasonal environment for your core business with some idiosyncratic factors. You know, is that sort of how you see the year playing out? Is there seasonality in your core business? And those idiosyncratic factors kind of aren't an issue beyond Q1? We heard from Mobileye this morning. They're pretty confident in the rebound in Q2. So what about that?
Yeah. So maybe unpack it. I'll just, like, remind everybody what we said on the call. So essentially, the real kind of core, core part of our business in CPUs is largely going to be seasonal in terms of its transition from the fourth quarter to the first quarter. But we're subseasonal when you look at us in terms of our guide. Because kind of these adjacent markets, Mobileye, the foundry business kind of transitioning away from traditional packaging into advanced packaging, there's a little bit of an air pocket there. Altera business, you know, kind of later to see the inventory correction. And so that impacts that business. So there's kind of like this, you know, kind of air pocket trough that's hitting us in the first quarter. And, you know, some of those businesses may take longer.
They may, you know, may kind of stretch into the second quarter before they really start to see a rebound. You know, we'd said that we would be up. When we talked on the earnings call, we'd be up sequentially. And we'd be up year over year in the second quarter. But still, you know, it's not, you know, off to the races. I think in the back half of the year, we have a really good we're set up really well. Because, one, all of that inventory stuff, we know, only takes a couple of quarters to work through. And so you start to see a recovery in the back half of the year from those adjacent markets that are having the inventory correction.
But on top of that, our core businesses, I think, have some really good tailwinds to them that really probably start hitting in the back half of the year. And you kind of hear it from customers that have talked in earnings and so forth. On the client side, you know, we do suspect that the AI PC will be, you know, will drive momentum as we progress through the year. And I think, in particular, it's going to be more of a back half play. We know Windows 10 is going into service. There will be some refresh activity that's likely to be part of the second half. So, you know, client looks like it's going to have actually, yes, you know, it'll have the seasonal benefits it normally has. But it's also going to have a little bit of a cyclical benefit because of those things happening.
And then on the data center side, as we know, you know, and I think others have talked about as well, you know, the units may be relatively flatish on a year-over-year basis. But the core count is growing significantly. And the ASPs for core are more stable than they've been. They have been, like, declining at a rate that, you know, where you haven't seen quite the growth rate. But we suspect that that's going to change. And so you'll have core count growth, you know, through the year that you'll start to see momentum. And then, you know, while, you know, like I said, we're not where we want to be yet on the AI front, AI will be a contributing factor to growth as we progress through the year. And so, you know, that will be another tailwind.
So all of that said, I think, you know, first half, yes, be better than the first half of last year. But the second half of the year feels like it's going to be really strong sequentially on a half over half basis. And of course, we did say on the earnings call that we thought it would be up, you know, year over year as well. So I think, you know, we're set up well for a very strong back half.
Yeah. OK. That's very helpful. Maybe just a couple of questions on that. On the data center side, last year, my perception is that AI crowded out a lot of the discretionary spend. So obviously, we bought servers when we need servers. But a lot of the sort of three-year replacement cycles got stretched and things like that. Do you see that changing over the course of this year?
Yeah. I think there's an inevitability. You have to, like, you know, start doing some refreshing in the CPU side. In addition, you know, AI needs CPUs as well, you know, on the head node. So I think that, you know, the likelihood is, we'll see a lift from AI even in the CPU space as we progress through the year. And then on top of that, I do suspect that, you know, we'll see strength. And it, you know, some of it is the, you know, the strength that you're talking about, you know, wallet shifting around a little bit. But a lot of it is just, you know, they're just bringing out more advanced, you know, higher core count solutions. And, you know, that's going to be a strength for us.
Market share in that data center segment, you know, your unquestioned leadership is still a year away. But you're getting closer on the product side. Can you talk about how you see market share there?
Yeah. I think we have stabilized. You know, quarter to quarter, it might be, you know, have a little bit of volatility. But I think, in general, we're kind of bouncing around at this level for market share until we get, you know, our products that are more competitive out. Sierra comes out, like I said, before the first half of this year is over. That's an important one because it's our first kind of efficient core product. And, you know, addresses a place in the market that, you know, we were more challenged in terms of in terms of what customers were looking for. And then Granite will come shortly after that. And that is a really great product for us, you know, high-performance product. And then we'll have a, like I said, the follow-on first 18A product, Clearwater Forest, coming out next year.
You know, we've got this kind of steady drumbeat of improving product portfolio that I think puts us in an increasingly better position competitively.
Great. That's helpful. And then on the AI side, you know, you said you're not where you want to be. I mean, you have talked about, at one point, $1 billion of backlog. And then I think that doubled. And, you know, is that still the ballpark of what you're kind of thinking about doing? And when you say you're not where you want to be, you know, what gets you where you want to be?
Yeah. I mean, first of all, it's pipeline that we talked about. I think we said at the earnings call it was like a $2 billion plus pipeline. You know, you got to then translate that into revenue. And some of the pipeline falls off when you kind of get to the revenue. So we need to build that pipeline up more significantly than it is today. I think it's, in some ways, a matter of just kind of grinding it out a little bit. Gaudi is a really good product in terms of performance. And there's been a lot of papers and analysis around that that shows that Gaudi is a really good product when it is matched up against other hardware. What we need to do is mature the software stack. And that's what we're in the process of doing and helping customers stand up the solution.
So I think it's just time, you know, just continually building the pipeline. I think, you know, AI will be an important contributor to the business. In addition, as things move from really big model training to smaller models, particularly as that moves to the on-prem, because some of these models are not going to the cloud because the data is proprietary. And they don't want to move it to the cloud. Then we're more in a sweet spot for us, I think, that where I think Gaudi and even our CPUs that address AI are better solutions in that space. And we have an ecosystem around that space that positions us better, I think. And so as things kind of buying behavior kind of transfers away from larger models, I think we have a real opportunity to drive a better position in the space.
And then lastly, I have to say, you know, we're also coming at these competitors as potential customers on the foundry side. And that's another opportunity for us to ride the AI wave, is to be, you know, a preferred foundry supplier to customers making AI chips.
There does seem to be a lot of AI opportunity to the traditional CPU business. I mean, you've talked about at one point, you know, most of the inference was happening on CPUs. And that's changing at the margin because some of the complexity of transformers is moving, especially silicon. But there's still an awful lot, I think, that you can do to accelerate inference in those markets.
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, like I said, I think when I even look at Intel, we're just now starting to look at all the data we have and starting to think about how we can kind of take advantage of that to do better in manufacturing, to do better in terms of our decision making, to do better or have more of our programming automated through AI. All of that stuff is in kind of its early stages. And I imagine that's true across most of corporations that are looking to take advantage of AI. And so, you know, we'll start to see more and more products rolled out that, you know, are either in the data center or even at the PC level. And that's, I think, where we have a tremendous opportunity.
Great. So I did want to focus a little bit also on capital spending and cash generation. You know, first on the CapEx side, you know, can you remind us kind of how I know you have a way of thinking about capital intensity minus offsets. Can you kind of walk us through some of that? And then there was a change to Ohio that, I guess, the time frame on Ohio got maybe pushed back. Does that have any effect on your capital intensity?
Yeah. So largely, in the period of kind of catch-up, we think that the net CapEx intensity of the business should be roughly in the mid-30s% of revenue. We were higher in 2023. We'll be lower in 2024. The blend of that will be kind of in the mid-30s%. And it's just a function of, you know, it's hard to call the timing on these offsets. They come in kind of lumpy fashions. And so we had less of it show up in 2023. We're going to have a lot more of it show up in 2024. But I think, still, the thesis was right. Mid-30s% of revenue as you're starting to do catch-up. And you got to remember, in Intel's case, we did not have, like, a Shell Ahead strategy, which is tough.
Because if you don't have a Shell Ahead strategy and you suddenly decide you need a fab, you now have 4 years to get a fab built, you know? So what we want to do is be ahead of that. So we had to, A, build up the fabs that we needed, but also get shells built ahead of that so that we could, you know, equip it as needed. It will then probably settle in the kind of mid-20s as a % of revenue on net CapEx intensity. Clearly, the 2023, 2024 time frame, I think we're mid-30s. We haven't quite built out the plan for 2025 yet. I'm not sure whether it's still in the catch-up mode or it's roughly down into the mid-20s. But within a year or two, I think we've settled into mid-20s as a % of revenue.
We're going to do really well on the offset side, for sure, which gives us an opportunity to put a few more dollars at work just to invest in the factories. Because I, you know, we thought we'd be in the kind of 20%-30% offset range, which, generally, when I give a range, it means I think it's the mid. But in this case, you know, the way things are tracking, the way things are playing out from a CHIPS perspective, both in the U.S. and Europe, what we think we will get in terms of CHIPS or the investment tax credit, you know, what we will do in terms of leveraging partners like Brookfield, we think we're actually at the higher end of that range, at least over the next few years. So that means roughly.
We're kind of approaching 30% offsets, which I think is a tremendous opportunity for us.
Yeah. And you just mentioned the parts that we know about. There's also stuff that we don't quite know about yet. I mean, Gina Raimondo was at your Direct Connect event, was very positive on the government's, you know, relationship with Intel and the sort of focus that they have. So it seems like the grant money, you know, could, you know, certainly, Intel should be a focus of where the grant money is delivered.
Yeah. I think we are. I think I want to say she said that we're the national champion. So I think that that's, you know, a good adjective to describe us. We're definitely committed to fulfilling the objectives of what the U.S. government wants for, you know, domesticating advanced semiconductor manufacturing. So, you know, all of that's going, I think, well. You know, we still have to get kind of settled on the chips grant. I think we have a good sense now on what the investment tax credit will yield. And so, you know, I think, you know, relatively shortly, you'll be hearing an announcement either from us or from the CPO office on, you know, that grant and what that looks like.
You know, things have gone I think the partnership has gone extremely well with the government in terms of, you know, having this established in a way that it fulfills everyone's objectives.
Yeah. Yeah. They're actually here tomorrow, Todd Fisher, who runs the network. So maybe you could talk about cash generation for the year. I think you talked about a free cash flow neutral kind of year. You know, that's not entirely intuitive to me, given everything else that you've said. But the cash of the CapEx is kind of tricky to figure out, too, because of the offset timing. And just kind of talk to us about how you think about free cash flow in 2024.
Yeah. Well, keep in mind, you know, I'm saying this kind of mid-30s as a % of revenue over the course of 2023 and 2024.
Right. So it's lower.
Much more elevated. So 2024 is going to be much lower. And so I think if you do the math, you'll kind of get there, probably. And you're right. You know, our goal is to be kind of roughly cash flow neutral for this year. You know, and I would say, you know, this was kind of the year that we were roughly targeting to be cash flow neutral, even back at Investor Day. And not surprisingly, this was not the revenue number we had predicted would happen.
The PC market would be smaller.
And so, you know, I think it does show that the company does a fairly good job of kind of taking the inputs of what's going on with the business and then controlling the things that we can control to make sure that, you know, we fulfill that commitment. After that, you know, the goal is ultimately, obviously, to get cash flow to 20% of revenue. So our goal throughout the next several years is to kind of chip away at getting to that goal. You know, some of it is, obviously, how we manage CapEx. And CapEx can be modulated. You know, we can still make the investments necessary to get to leading edge, but modulate the capacity in a way that, you know, adjusts the CapEx but still fulfills our objectives in terms of getting the leading edge technology out. So that's part of it.
Obviously, the offsets, you know, we do better on the offsets. That also helps. But, you know, there are other things we're driving. We're driving working capital improvements. I think last year, we think we did at least $2 billion of improvement on cash flow just on working capital improvements. So cash flow for operations did better, I think, than we expected, I think, than what most people expected. You know, anything we can do in terms of being more efficient, obviously, helps as well. I think we cut $3 billion of spending out last year. We're going to chip away at trying to drive efficiencies this year. Ultimately, we want to be pulling out another $5-$7 billion of spending efficiencies to help, you know, improve the cash flow as well.
So, you know, I think investors should just kind of take away from this, it's a huge focus for us. We know it influences the value of the company, the valuation. But also, it's important for us in terms of our funding objectives. So I've got everybody in the company super focused on this as a metric to drive.
Great. Well, you've made a lot of progress, for sure. Let me pause there and see if we have questions from the audience. Here? Charlie?
Thanks, Joe. Hi, Dave. Thanks for your sharing. So I'm Joe's colleague, Charlie from Morgan Stanley. So I have a question about your foundry outsourcing. So it seems to show some interest to your outsourcing to TSMC. But TSMC also supplies to your competitors, right, like AMD, Arm-based CPU, et cetera. So what kind of commitments you can give to TSMC for this foundry vendor to build capacity for you? And also, kind of a higher-level question, how do we think about the outsourcing strategy versus what you just mentioned, right, domestic manufacturing for the U.S.? Thanks.
Yeah. So, you know, we're a big customer of TSMC's. Obviously, I think that's not surprising. And we'll continue to be a customer of TSMC's. That's clearly the goal. I think, probably, we are a little bit heavier than we want to be in terms of external wafer manufacturing versus internal. But we're always going to use external foundries for wafers. In fact, we have this thing that we rolled out. We call it Smart Capital. Pat's good at, like, catchy names. This is one of them. Using finance and creating a catchy name, I love. But anyway, one of the big pillars of Smart Capital is to use foundries, you know, that we can't, you know, build out the capacity in total for everything we need. We need to make sure that others are doing it. We've got a great partnership with TSMC. Yeah, we're a competitor.
You know, we'll fight that out. I'm not sure we're a major competitor to theirs. We're kind of the second source or, you know, the one that can supply in markets outside of Taiwan. And that's really kind of our goal as it relates to TSMC. But, you know, we're a partner of theirs. We are a customer of theirs. We actually sell stuff to them from our IMS business, our mask writing business. So, you know, it's a great relationship. I know Pat and Cece meet on a regular basis. They have a great relationship. So I'm not particularly worried about it. What was the second part of the question? I forget now. Yeah, sorry. Whenever you ask a two-part question to me, it's always a failure because I can never remember the second one.
Yeah. So the second part was actually about how to reconcile your outsourcing versus your getting support from the U.S. governments, right, for domestic manufacturing. But I think you kind of covered that.
Yeah. I think I.
Yeah. So more specific is about your commitments to TSMC, right? Because TSMC, at their earnings call, they're sort of concerned about your kind of internal kind of technology development as well. But taking this chance, I actually have another small question about your Habana business. The question is the shipment to China, right, because the performance seems to be great. How about the performance density? Does it comply with the U.S. export control? Just want to see whether there's kind of upside from your China business.
Yeah. I mean, obviously, China is an important market. It's an important market for us broadly across, you know, all of our solutions. So, you know, we focus a lot on it. Obviously, there are certain restrictions that we have that BIS requires from us. Some of it's related to technologies like that. Some of it is more broadly related to certain customers. And, you know, obviously, we comply with all of those. But yet, you know, we still need to make sure that we keep that market for us because it generates at least a quarter of our revenue. And we'll, you know, continue to focus on making sure we bring out products that, you know, obviously, are compliant with what export licenses dictate, but, you know, also meet what customers in China need from Intel.
Questions over here?
Just wanted to ask a quick question about the Intel Foundry Services and really, as it relates to Arm v9 and your potential manufacturing of that. Arm are pushing into compute subsystems quite aggressively now. I just wondered if you reserve the right of refusal to make a chipset on behalf of a customer that's using v9 that would go directly against some of your own silicon.
You know, the way we're going to run, without directly talking about that because some of that stuff is confidential, I would just say the way we're going to run the company is foundry needs to go out and win business. And, you know, ARM being an important relationship, an important ecosystem partner in the foundry space will be a significant partner for us. And they will do whatever is necessary to meet whatever customers need from them. That is counter to the product business in some respects. But the product business is getting a different order, which is go out there and win every, you know, compute socket you can possibly win. And in some ways, it's a conflict. But, you know, that's the way we're going to run the company.
I think there's time for one more question in the front.
Hi. Thank you. How quickly can you ramp up in the foundry services your trailing edge or non-bleeding edge business to sort of start getting cash flow from these underutilized facilities?
Yeah. I mean, so Intel 16, we do have a customer on that. We also have a customer, maybe multiple customers on Intel 3. So we are doing that. It does take time, too. You know, it is like, you know, a year or two, in some cases, to ramp those customers. It also takes a little bit of time because, you know, those particular processes weren't developed to be foundry processes, whereas 18A, I think we really came at it with that mindset. So we have to do a little bit of, like, lifting with customers. That takes a little bit longer. So it's, you know, onboarding a customer takes a bit of time, which kind of slows down the process. But it's absolutely part of the approach.
We also, you know, in order to kind of accelerate it a little bit further, we've also partnered with certain legacy foundry customers to help accelerate it. We did that with Tower. We're doing that also with UMC. And those opportunities also, I think, we can move more quickly in terms of generating revenue and cash flow to help, you know, drive a better financial profile and, obviously, you know, be able to invest in the leading edge.
Great.
Thank you.
Well, that takes us up to the end of our time. Thanks, Dave. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.