All right, great. We'd like to get started. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us. My name is Toshiya Hari. I cover the U.S. semiconductor space here at Goldman. Great to have John Pitzer from Intel here with us. He's a corporate VP, planning and IR. Before diving into questions, I need to go through disclosures. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties and may reference non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to Intel's most recent earnings release and annual report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC for more information on the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially and additional information on our non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations where appropriate, to the corresponding GAAP financial measures.
How did I do?
Perfect.
Okay, great.
Appreciate that. So it's, it's a mouthful.
Yeah, it is. It is. So we do have, you know, 40 minutes+, John, which I think is a little longer than typical. So I wanted to start off with a high-level kind of softball question. I think you joined Intel roughly 2 years ago from the sell side. What's the experience been like? Any surprises in terms of what you see internally, how you think about the markets? Yeah.
Yeah.
Reflect on it too.
It's a good question. I put a lot of thought into this over the last couple of days, because to your point, it's almost been two years to the day since I joined, and it oftentimes feels a lot longer than that. And, you know, as I think about kind of coming into the organization and what's really surprised me, I'm gonna kind of turn the question a little bit. It's actually everything that we've been able to accomplish over the last couple of years, quite frankly, and it's clearly not because of me. It's really started when Pat rejoined a little bit more than three years ago. But if I kind of had to kind of focus on kind of the key accomplishments and, you know, listen, we still have a lot of work that we need to do.
A lot of these accomplishments haven't flown through the P&L or the cash flow statement yet. But the three that really stand out in my mind is, is really the execution engine and getting that back on track with 5 nodes in 4 years. I mean, quite frankly, when Pat first came back to the organization and made that declaration, a lot of people thought he was crazy. You know, we're now fully through the Intel 7 ramp, the Intel 4 ramp. We've PRQ'd Sierra Forest. That means Intel 3 is now in the process of ramping. You know, we've talked about getting the 1.0 PDK for 18A out this quarter. We've got products in fabs that will be ramping middle of next year for release in the second half of next year with Clearwater and Panther Lake.
Really, the ability to execute on the 5 nodes in 4 years was something that I think a lot of people doubted, and we're kind of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on that one. The second one really is how much work the organization's done to stand up the Intel Foundry Services business, now being led by Kevin O'Buckley. I mean, I think that really culminated in February at the Intel Direct Connect event. To me, I think what was most pleasant to see is how much of an ecosystem development that we've done since the last time we tried the foundry effort pre-Pat and were not successful.
It was great to see, you know, accolades from ARM, from Cadence, from Synopsys, from Broadcom on our packaging, and it, and it really speaks to how far we've progressed in building out that ecosystem. We now have 6 Intel 18A external foundry customers. We've got a lifetime deal value of greater than $15 billion, and I think we're well on our way to our aspirations of being the second largest external foundry by 2030. And then the third thing I would kind of point out as a relatively big accomplishment is everything we've done around smart capital to make sure that we can invest in the strategy in a way that, that is, you know, strategic, and yet, I think, is beneficial to our owners' capital.
And it really, you know, starts with the CHIPS Act and everything that Pat and the organization did to drive completion of the CHIPS Act. But I'd also bring up, you know, the Skip One transaction with Brookfield, what we've done with Mobileye, the path we've set Altera on, you know, the investments that we've gotten with IMS. It really allows us to have multiple pools of capital to really go pursue the strategy, you know, especially during a period of time where the economics of the business are still playing catch up.
Mm-hmm. That makes sense. No, so thank you for that. On the foundry ecosystem that you talked about, investing in it, you know, building out the ecosystem, you made a significant amount of progress. Is it fair to say that you have the necessary pieces to be effective and competitive in foundry, or do you feel like you still have a little bit more, more work to do? And if you do, what are those pieces?
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think from a technology perspective, we're clearly on the right track. And like I said, the next big milestone is the 1.0 PDK for 18A, which we expect to get out this quarter. That's going to be an important one. I think from a cost structure perspective, we're still at the beginning stages of that journey, and that was really a key part of the rationale of providing Intel Foundry with their own P&L for the first time ever. You know, as you know, historically in the IDM 1.0 model, Intel Foundry was really an allocated cost out to the BUs, and they really focused on two things: speed of node transition and having available capacity. And they prioritized that over sort of cost and efficiency.
As you know, being a good foundry is not just about the technology, it's also the cost structure, and quite frankly, it's also the services. I think that one of the things that we've done a good job on the services side is actually, you know, augmenting our internal talent with a lot of external hires that have foundry experiences. The most recent being Kevin O'Buckley, with his background at Marvell, prior to that, Avera, prior to that, GlobalFoundries. You know, we're happy to have him as the leader on that external foundry strategy.
Got it. In terms of customer engagements, in the foundry business, you publicly announced many customers, I think MediaTek, Amazon, most recently Microsoft. What characteristics of IFS drove success with those engagements and those customers? And to the extent you've had instances where customers said, "No, thank you, we'll continue to work with foundry A, B, and C," what were some of the concerns that they had?
Yeah, so I think, as not hard to imagine, given our legacy in high-performance compute transistors, you know, our foundry efforts probably have been most successful within the HPC market as opposed to the mobile market. You know, I think one of the things that Ann talked about at the Direct Connect event in February is that we're going to bring out subsequent sort of flavors of Intel 18A that might be more mobile applicable. So that is a market that we definitely have in our crosshairs. But if you look at our success to date, it has really been more on the wafer side, within HPC. I think on the packaging side, you know, we've been pleasantly surprised. You know, we've clearly gotten significant incoming interest because of the current capacity constraints for CoWoS.
I think what's been good to see is that those tactical conversations have quickly morphed into more strategic conversations as customers start to understand our roadmap in advanced packaging and how that aligns with their product roadmap over time. It really is an area that we've got significant differentiation. We'll start to ramp some of the advanced packaging wins later this year, more fully in 2026. As Pat has said, it's a fantastic on-ramp vehicle to bring customers into the Intel Foundry on the packaging side, show them our capability, you know, hopefully over-execute relative to our commitments and get them to morph into a wafer customer. That's been, I think, a pretty powerful dynamic for us to date.
Got it. Conflict of interest is something that comes up, still comes up, in my conversations with investors. I know you guys, you know, segmented the two businesses, if you will. Is that something that comes, still comes up with customers or potential customers? And I guess part two is, the Intel product team, are they truly free to work with IFS or TSMC or what have you?
Yeah, I mean, listen, it's a potential concern. It's not the most significant one. The most significant one is, can we execute-
Yeah
... to our technology roadmap and to their needs from a product perspective? And I'll remind you, Toshiya, and you know this well, co-opetition is a very common dynamic across the tech sector. So it's not as if, you know, these companies haven't dealt with the co-opetition dynamics in other parts of their business. You know, I think that we've taken great pains to kind of separate the two operations. You know, Dave has talked about separate legal entities for both, separate ERP instances for both, separate P&Ls for both. And, you know, to be clear, the giving Intel Foundry a P&L was really a way to drive different behaviors internally, and that was the primary reason why we did it.
Giving more transparency to our owners, giving more transparencies to potential customer was an added benefit, and so we think we're managing through that fairly well. I would also remind you, we are better together. You know, having Intel products as a Customer Zero helps to de-risk the yield curve for subsequent external customers that come onto a node after that, and so there is some comfort level in there. To the second half of your question, you know, how much agency does Intel products have to use external foundries? I mean, listen, I think if Michelle were on stage right now, she would say, "I'd always want TSMC to be a supplier of tiles for me." It's healthy to have that competition between an external foundry and the internal foundry.
I think clearly, as we get our roadmap back in shape on 5 nodes in 4 years, we think that what we call the PPA, or performance, power, and area deficit that we're in today, goes away. It just makes a lot of sense from a better product standpoint and a better economics for the overall company to start bringing some of those tiles back. As we've talked about over the next couple of years, you know, our client strategy now has significant tiles going to external foundries. It is a headwind to gross margin improvement in 2024 and 2025. But as we get to Panther Lake and Intel 18A late next year, we think we have a real opportunity to pull wafers back in.
As Pat has mentioned, we think there's about two mods worth of potential incremental wafers that we can pull back in over time to help fill our fabs.
Got it. I think you sort of answered my next question, but IFS profitability, you've talked about losses peaking this year, and reaching break even sometime between now and 2030. I think you mentioned a couple of things there, but the key drivers, did I get you there?
Yeah. So the break even was the midpoint between now and 2030. If you kind of do the math on that, it implies somewhere in 2027, we think we're going to, to break even. And as we talked about in the event we hosted in early April, we tried to provide a target model, and I'll stress it's a target model, not a forecast, that had relatively reasonable to conservative revenue assumptions. And so if you look at the endpoint of sort of a 60/40 model by 2030, that's really based on about $100 billion of revenue in that timeframe. The way you get there is $15 billion coming from external foundry, $85 billion coming from Intel products and sort of Intel, all other Mobileye and Altera.
And the breakdown of that is really an assumption of about a 3%-5% growth rate in our core businesses, some accelerator share gains, and Mobileye and Altera, which are, you know, historically faster-growing businesses, growing more like a 10% CAGR. And so we think all of that is a relatively reasonable revenue forecast to be able to drive that margin structure. If you look at the point between now and break even, I would sort of make the argument that it's even less dependent on demand growth and consumption growth, because really, what we're counting on is a mix shift in our wafer capacity from uneconomical Intel 7 to very economical Intel 18A, and the ability to pull tiles back in independent of what PC unit growth does.
A lot of that is in our control, and I think one of the things that we wanted to stress in early April is that if you look at the move from Intel 7 to Intel 18A, the ASP per wafer goes up almost 3x. The cost per wafer doesn't change that significantly, and it really kind of illustrates how uneconomic the Intel 7 process is without EUV, with all that multi-patterning. While it's going to take time for that mix shift to occur, we have a high level of visibility and confidence that we will get there in that timeline, somewhat independent about what happens with demand. Now, as you think about the 60/40 model out to 2030, clearly scale will help get us there more quickly, and it's more demand dependent.
We've got a lot of the levers to get to breakeven that are in our control.
Got it. And the tiles coming back in, is that a 2026 dynamic? When, when does that start to kind of go in motion and-
Yeah, so this is really the first full year where we're using the tile strategy for our client business, and that's clearly Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and Arrow Lake. Those units will ramp again next year, and so that exposure goes up next year. And as we get to Panther Lake, really at the end of 2025, going into 2026, we'll have opportunities to pull those tiles back in. But it, it does take time. I mean, one of the, the contextual points that I try to make is we've given a forecast of 40+ million AI PCs this year.
Mm.
Going to 60+ million units next year. Now, that's a forecast. We could be under-calling the market, but that's about in line with what other people are thinking. If that holds, it still means that two-thirds of our units next year in client are not AI PCs. To kind of give you some context of how long these transitions sometimes take to flow through the P&L and the cash flow statement.
Got it. Makes sense. Shifting gears a little bit, in the world of AI, obviously, a lot going on. You know, I think there's a CPU to GPU sort of trend currently, and there's one company with a very large loud megaphone. We did have Renee James here at the conference yesterday, and she talked about the important role CPUs play, and I think you guys have talked about that too, particularly within the context of inference. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that, and then more importantly, your target, your goals in acceleration, as it relates to Gaudi and Falcon Shores.
Yeah, let me flip the order of that question and hit accelerators first, and then transition into the importance of CPUs within all this. You know, clearly, we're happy from a Gaudi perspective that we've moved from pipeline to backlog and revenue, and we gave out a target of greater than $500 million in revenue this year from Gaudi, which is a decent start, but relative to the overall size of the market, we're not satisfied. We think momentum is growing well. I would point out specifically with our Intel Developer Cloud, we're seeing very high interest, which is really our way to try to bring enterprise customers onto a Gaudi platform in kind of a frictionless, seamless way, for them, and we're seeing good traction there.
We have said that if we had more supply this year, we'd likely be able to ship more Gaudi. We've secured more supply for next year. I think the important milestone for us is really the move to Falcon Shores, which we talked about as being a late 2025 event, and really having our first true GPU offering in that market. But we are very excited with Gaudi as an accelerator for the applications that we focus on. It has superior TCO to many other accelerators that are in the market, and we think it's a compelling product and will be for the next 18-24 months and even longer.
As you think about sort of the role of CPUs, you know, one of the things that we try to level set investors on is we don't really think about AI as necessarily being a TAM, as much as a workload that's got to span across the compute continuum. You know, you've got to go from data center into network, into enterprise, into client, and into edge. Rightfully so, today, all the activity is really hyperscale training and inference of these ginormous LLMs, where a GPU is particularly well suited from a TCO perspective. But we're in the bottom of the first inning of the AI deployment, and quite frankly, the next, I think, longer and larger phase will be as you deploy AI out from the center, out to the edge, with inference on smaller LLMs.
The point that we keep trying to make is, as you think about that compute continuum, depending upon where you are, and what application you're running, there's going to be an optimal sort of silicon solution that's going to drive the best TCO. As you move into networking, enterprise, and definitely client and edge, CPU is going to have an important role to play on that. You're seeing that today with all the excitement around the AI PC. We are the first to market with an AI CPU for the PC with integrated NPUs. You know, I love the fact that Microsoft is looking to monetize all their investment in the cloud by pushing AI to the edge with the AI PC, because I think it's a good instructive model of how AI ultimately gets monetized over time.
As you move from that center out, you're really going into ecosystems and really silicon, you know, product portfolios where we have a lot of strength.
Mm.
We think that that's going to bode well and make us very levered to this trend, independent of what happens in core acceleration in the cloud.
Got it. And just going back to the accelerator side of the portfolio, Gaudi and Falcon Shores, how do you compete with the incumbent? How do you differentiate vis-a-vis the incumbent?
... Well, right now with Gaudi, it's a TCO argument. And some of that is entry price, but some of that is just raw performance as well. And like I said, for applications where we have the ability to go in and optimize for a customer, you know, the Gaudi TCO is, you know, competitive with everything in the marketplace right now, and in many instances, more competitive from a TCO perspective. The issue with Gaudi is it's not as programmable as a GPU. And so as you think about trying to have a leveraged sort of product portfolio into that accelerator market, Falcon Shores is going to help a lot. And remember, Falcon Shores doesn't get rid of Gaudi. It incorporates the best of Gaudi with our GPU technology. And as I said earlier, you know, we'll have that in market in late 2025.
Got it. On the server CPU side, had a couple of questions on the roadmap. I guess before we go there, maybe on the demand environment, 2023 was a very challenging year for the industry. I think Mercury had units down more than 30%. And with AI, you know, CPUs kind of got boxed out, if you will. Both you, your nearest competitor, others, have sort of suggested that the environment's bottoming and hopefully improving. What is your outlook into the back half? And as you think about your overall business growing year-over-year for the full year, what's embedded from a server CPU perspective?
Yeah, I'll just remind, we only guide revenue one quarter out. Implied in our original guidance was really for, you know, our DCAI business to be relatively flattish sequentially Q1 to Q2, which would have been at the low end of seasonality. Now, remember, we did inter-quarter update with an 8-K. That was more about consumer and NEX than it was about DCAI, so that flattish for DCAI probably still holds for Q2. As we look into the back half of the year, clearly some of the statements we have made would suggest a better than seasonal back half. I think as we think about server market in general, that's more about core growth and ASP per unit than it is any significant sort of unit rebound that we're embedding in our forecast.
So, you know, roughly speaking, in the first half of the year, you know, units are gonna probably be down low single digits year-over-year. Roughly speaking, in the second half of the year, they're probably gonna be up low single digits year-over-year. What we can really have some visibility into is what's happening to core count around those units and what's happening to ASP per units. So we do expect a revenue uplift that is larger than the expected unit uplift if we go into the back half of the year. But clearly, you know, we're still fighting what a lot of companies in tech are fighting right now, which is accelerators are eating up a lot of the IT budget. You heard that from software companies as late as last night in their earnings.
And so, you know, we're going through that today, but we do see, you know, as you pointed out, kind of a bottoming process.
Okay. Understood. In terms of the roadmap and how to think about competition, to your prior point, you know, you're launching Sierra Forest, you've got Granite coming in, I believe, in the second half. I guess, first of all, what's been the early feedback from your important customers on both platforms, and how should we think about, you know, your server share stabilizing going forward?
Yeah, feedbacks have been good. As we talked about, we PRQ'd Sierra Forest this quarter, Q2. We'll PRQ, i.e., launch Granite in Q3. Sierra is our first E-core server product, E being our efficient core. You know, all of the Rapids lines are our performance core or our P-core. What we've talked about relative to share is from the Q3 level of last year, we see share this year plus or minus flattish. Now, I think that's still more driven on the back of Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids, because while Sierra and Granite will be ramping in the back half of the year, they become a much bigger part of the equation more next year than necessarily this year.
We do think as we go into next year with that product portfolio, that we have the opportunity to win back share in the server market.
Okay. And most of those gains would probably come on the cloud side, because enterprise, you never lost.
Yeah, it's a very good point. I mean, it really speaks volume to our ecosystem strength within enterprise, because if you look at the share loss that's incurred, it's been mostly in the cloud, as you pointed out.
Got it. ARM-based custom CPUs, I think Graviton has been pretty successful, obviously, within the context of their own infrastructure. Microsoft, Google, have recently come out with announcements. How do you think about that? Again, to your prior point, there's a bit of a co-opetition dynamic there. On the foundry side, you could certainly service them. So how do you think about that balance?
Yeah, it's a really good point. I mean, I think we have a great opportunity on Intel Foundries, both on the packaging side and on the wafer side, to really capitalize on hyperscale companies that wanna do their own internal silicon. And we're gonna, you know, drive that to the best of our ability to be levered to that. What I'll tell you is, we think about the market overall, those internal solutions have been very successful for internal workloads. They've been significantly less successful for external workloads, where we think the x86 ecosystem lock-in is really important. Now, clearly, from a performance per watt perspective, you know, both ourselves and AMD need to be competitive, and we've got product portfolios that will do that.
But we think going forward, the hyperscale companies aren't gonna stop doing what they're doing relative to their internal workloads, and we've got a strategy to capitalize on that. But for those external workloads, we think we're very well positioned.
Got it. I'm gonna pause here. I've got a bunch more on the client side, but if there are any questions? Go ahead.
Thanks for taking the question. John, one of the things that has been interesting to watch Intel is you've, you've been very willing to sort of go to the cutting edge. So for instance, using High NA, I think you're probably gonna have insertion before-
... most other of the other big players. And as you talked earlier, it seems like you're on track to that, which is great. Any other technologies that, you know, as you think about the next three to five years, that you may be contemplating or be interested in to sort of further that sort of technological gap, if you will? I'm thinking things like, you know, solid state micro-bunching and factories and that sort of thing. You know, are you considering things like that, that may be something we need to think about in a positive way for you guys over the next five years? Thanks.
Yeah, it's a good question. I'm a little bit hamstrung by what we've actually been public on versus what we haven't. As you pointed out, you know, we received a receipt of our first high-NA tool around Christmas time last year in Oregon, and that's now being installed, and we're looking forward, you know, to running test wafers through that. Our plan of record is to intercept high-NA at Intel 14A. I'll also remind you that if for any reason, high-NA is not production worthy at that point, we can still move forward with Intel 14A. It's fully backward compatible with just an EUV process, and that was really important for us from a risk mitigation perspective.
And, you know, we'll make the decision on insertion of high NA based upon total cost of ownership and economics as much as performance, and so stay tuned on that front. You know, beyond that, we've talked about Gate-All-Around and the fact that we think we're going to have a two-plus year lead versus peers on introduction of Gate-All-Around. And the other big one that we've announced, and we did it at Innovation last fall, was just glass substrates, which will happen later on this decade. There's a lot more under the hood that we haven't really talked about, so I'll probably just stop my answer there and tell you to be patient as we bring out more, sort of technology transitions.
Any other questions? Pivoting to the PC side, I'm sure we'll get updates from Pat next week at Computex, but curious how you're thinking about the AI PC opportunity. I mean, to your prior comment, I think, you know, you'll start to see some models hit the market back half of the year, but it's really 25 and then beyond when the market takes off, if you will. But in your mind, what are the top, maybe one or two or three killer applications that you think could catalyze growth in the market? I think you guys have a really strong intelligence team internally that tracks install base and replacement cycles.
You know, if you can share some of that with us and you know, how are you thinking about the PC TAM growth going forward, that would be really helpful.
Yeah, I want to be careful not to steal any thunder from Pat's keynote next week. He'll be on stage in Taipei, I believe, Monday night, US time. So stay tuned on that. You know, we talked about a couple of quarters ago, working with over 200 ISVs to really optimize AI-infused applications on the PC. I think that number is now north of 500 ISVs. And so, you know, stay tuned. We think every quarter that goes by, you're going to see more and more applications. Clearly, anything that makes us more efficient in our email and in our inbox, and, you know, Microsoft has talked about some of this stuff with Copilot. We're pretty excited about.
You know, but I will say that, you know, we were the first to talk about the AI PC, and when we first kind of brought out that brand, you know, Pat likened it to a Centrino moment. And there was a reason for that, in large part because it took the ecosystem, you know, 12-18 months of kind of understanding the capabilities of Centrino before it became a real sort of application driver in the market. And when it did, it was less of a unit driver than it was an ASP driver, and that's sort of how we're viewing the AI PC. We're extremely bullish. We love our roadmap. We'll have more to say about that, next week at Computex, especially around Lunar Lake, and the performance and battery life there, so stay tuned.
but, you know, as you look into the back half of the year, what's probably a little bit more tangible to us is just the enterprise refresh that we expect ahead of the end of life of the SLA on Windows 10. And typically, that happens about 12 months in advance, of the end of life, and the end of life is October of next year. And, you know, we have a very strong ecosystem in the overall PC market. It's even stronger with an enterprise because of what we do with vPro around security and manageability.
Even if, you know, we don't have a critical mass of killer apps for AI PCs, we're pretty confident that enterprises are going to want to future-proof any purchases they start to make in the back half of the year by driving an AI installed base as they refresh. And so we're well positioned for that, and we're looking forward to it.
That makes a ton of sense. My next question, maybe your response is stay tuned and wait for Pat to say something. But, Windows on ARM and what that means for you guys from a competitive standpoint is a question that we've been getting. A lot of headlines around Qualcomm and others. You know, what are some of the sources of differentiation or competitive advantage that you can deliver?
Yeah, so, you know, we take all competition seriously, and we like competition. It only makes us better. I'd be remiss not to remind the audience that the ARM on Windows PC is not a new dynamic. It's been around for 11 or 12 years, and, you know, to date, there's only been really one successful ARM PC vendor away from the Windows sort of ecosystem, and that's been Apple. And, you know, part of that is because they own the software, they own the hardware, they own the silicon, and they own the ecosystem. And ecosystems are very powerful, and it's one of the things that we like to talk about within our PC business. We have a very strong ecosystem across the market.
Stronger in enterprise, which is about half the market, not necessarily as strong in consumer, but we still spend a lot of time, effort, and dollars to make sure that our OEM partners, our ISV partners, are very successful in that market. I think as we bring Lunar Lake to market, I think the clear message that, that I'd like to say is, we don't think we're going to have a performance and/or battery life deficiency to our peers in the back half of the year. But I'd say stay tuned for the Computex keynote on that front. And we think that the ecosystem that we've developed, both in enterprise and across the overall market, positions us very well to benefit from the AI PC trend.
Got it. Got it. You talked a little bit about the 8-K that you put out recently, and I think you said it wasn't so much a DCAI dynamic, but can you kind of walk us through what drove that and-
Yeah, so just as a reminder, we put out an 8-K a few weeks after earnings in response to some incremental export bans, restrictions that came down a little bit unexpected. What we had said in the 8-K is that while we're still tracking to the range of $12.5 billion-$13.5 billion, we're tracking below the midpoint because of these restrictions. It's really more around one customer on our consumer side. To give you a little bit more context, that license to that customer was always up for renewal in Q3, and our expectation had always been that we weren't going to get it renewed.
But it was a little bit of surprise that, you know, the restriction was pulled forward into Q2, which is why we put out the 8-K that we did. Probably important to note that not being able to ship to one OEM doesn't necessarily change the size of the market, and so we do think over time, we'll be able to recapture that revenue with other OEMs in the back half of the year. A little bit difficult to do inter-quarter, which is why we gave the incremental guidance that we did.
Okay. Got it. The incremental change, though, was purely driven by the government?
That. Yes.
Yep, yep. Okay.
The BIS restriction.
Got it. Okay, perfect. I guess some financial questions. Gross margins, you guided full-year gross margins to improve 200 basis points year-over-year. Puts and takes, and if you can provide the bridge to 60%, which is your 2030 target, that would be helpful.
Yeah, so, you know, when you think about the puts and takes for this year, a lot of it comes down to the volumes expected in the back half of the year, which are really driving leverage through the model. I think when we guided Q2, the guidance we gave was a little bit disappointing. You know, one of the drivers of that is Meteor Lake was stronger than we had expected in Q1. And if you remember, on basically inline revenue for Q1, we beat gross margin. A big driver of that was that Meteor Lake was a larger percent of the revenue than we had expected. And as you know, before we PRQ a product, we reserve it at 100%.
And so those first units that we actually do sell are pretty high margin units, which is what drove the better than expected gross margins. But that stole a little bit of those units from Q2, which is why you're seeing sort of the dynamic that we originally guided to from Q1 into Q2. As you go into the back half of the year, it really is a function of the volumes that we expect, both in Q3 and Q4, and the leverage we should get from the incremental volume. Relative to your longer-term question of sort of 60% by 2030, I mean, clearly, you know, we've given you the P&L for Intel products. We've given you the P&L for Intel Foundries, at least on the operating margin line. The biggest incremental, you know, driver of improvements there is really at Intel Foundry.
And I did talk about, you know, already the path to break even, you know, being, you know, something that we have relatively high certainty to, because a lot of those things are in our control, and we can see them. As you go beyond sort of the midpoint in the back half of the year, you know, it will be volume-based drivers that get us to that 60%. You know, quite frankly, as I pointed out, we tried to build a target model with reasonable to conservative revenue estimates. Even the $15 billion of external foundry revenue, which seems a little bit ambitious, that would still only be about 10%-12% of the market, from a market share perspective, which we think is a reasonable target for us to go after.
We've got a pretty high degree of confidence that as we get through sort of the accelerated investments of today, get into an economic 18A node and see volume growth beyond that, the model we gave you is a very reasonable model to think about.
Got it. From an OpEx perspective, I think Pat and Dave have, you know, introduced many measures. You've made a lot of progress. As you look to reduce, you know, OpEx intensity to 20% by 2030, is that primarily revenue growth that gets you there, or is there still more to do from on an absolute basis?
No, I mean, I think the way to think about it is I kind of gave you a target of $100 billion of revenue in by 2030 and a 60/40 model, so that implies OpEx at about $20 billion in 2030, which is not significantly different than where we are today.
Yeah.
And so it really is kind of trying to keep the dollar amount flat as revenue grows. And I'll remind you that, you know, from a historical perspective, you know, getting to 60% gross margin is something that the organization has proven it can do multiple times in the past. The bigger challenge is really the 20% of revenue being spent on OpEx. You know, historically, we're an organization that feels pretty comfortable above 30. I think the best in a cyclical peak was closer to 25, and so, you know, one of the big cultural changes, how do we drive the organization to a 20% sort of OpEx-to-revenue ratio? And that really comes into the fact that, you know, and Dave has been very vocal about that.
We think we've got a lot of efficiencies that we can drive throughout the organization, to be able to accomplish that.
Capital spending, near term and long term, I know you guys don't give guidance per se, but how are you thinking about that internally? Obviously, you've been very aggressive from a 5 nodes in 4 years perspective, and even successful. You talked about the smart capital strategy working really well for you guys. So both in terms of gross CapEx and net CapEx, how should we be thinking about that going forward?
Yeah, I mean, listen, we're in a period of catch-up investment that Dave has talked about and Pat has talked about. You know, we're going to be aggressive on the five nodes in four years. Even last year, as we were going through austerity, you know, we did everything we could to protect those investments because we think it generates the highest return for our owners with their capital, and so we'll continue to pursue that. You know, as we've sort of talked about, during this period of outsized investment, a net CapEx to rev ratio of sort of 35% is the right way, mid-30s% is the right way to think about it. You know, we'll glide past that down to probably the mid-20s.
I think one of the opportunities we have now that we've got sort of these two separate P&Ls, is to find incremental capital efficiencies. You know, we've talked a little bit about this. You know, there are things that Intel product can do now that they have more agency over their op margin, that will have an immediate positive impact to their P&L. We've talked about the reduction in hot lots. We've talked about the reduction in test times. That doesn't necessarily have an immediate positive impact for Intel consolidated, because we still have that capacity in place. But what that behavior does is it changes a different demand signal, or it drives a different demand signal into Intel Foundry that allows them to then make adjustments around their capital spending needs.
Now, having said that, you know, we're gonna continue to pursue our smart capital strategy, which is to build, you know, shells ahead, and then facilitate those shells as needed. What I'll remind you, though, is we're kind of in a unique position, because I think most people in this room would agree that between now and 2030, semiconductor revenue is probably poised to double. It's likely that the foundry capacity is gonna grow faster than the overall capacity, and it's highly likely that foundry capacity outside of Asia, in U.S. and Europe, is likely to grow faster than overall foundry capacity.
With our smart capital strategy, you know, we have the opportunity to actually build fabs at really $0.65 on the dollar when you think about all the incentives, you know, all the things like, you know, the Skip One and other avenues that we have. If we're successful, you know, as we like to say, mediocre foundries get valued at 2 times book, and really good foundries get valued at 5 times book or more. So we have the opportunity to spend $0.65 today for an outcome of $2-$5, you know, in the future. Seems like a relatively high return of our owners' capital, and it's a key part of our strategy.
Got it. John, you just talked about book value. I think both Pat and Dave, you guys have been pretty vocal about obviously caring about shareholder return, creating value. You know, I think. Can you remind us what your plans are for Altera going forward, and how should investors think about your long-term intentions around Mobileye?
Yeah. So, you know, in Q3 of last year, we announced our intent to put Altera on a similar track that we put Mobileye, which means that this year we're going to bring in a private investor on a path to an IPO over the next several years. We made that decision because, you know, Pat and Dave and the team came to the conclusion that, you know, them having agency allowed them to do things and go after parts of the market like industrial, auto, and infrastructure, that, quite frankly, we probably de-emphasized as being a part of a division inside of Intel. And as you know, for the FPGA market, those are some of the most attractive long-tail markets out there.
And so, you know, one of the things that I don't think Pat gets nearly enough credit as he deserves, is how much time he spends on you know, thinking about stakeholder value and how to create value and capital allocation. And I think part of his calculus was that there was a much better path to create value, giving Altera the agency and moving down the path of IPO. We'll do the same thing that, that, that we've done with Mobileye, which is get the asset out there. And, you know, you talk about what's our intent on Mobileye, we have a lot of faith that, that the business only gets better from here. Having said that, you know, it is another source of sort of pool of capital that we can use to go off and prosecute the core strategy if we need to.
And it's a little bit of a balancing act. We also take into consideration the fact that many of the public owners of Mobileye right now would like a little bit more liquidity, if it were possible. And so there's a lot of different sort of metrics that we try to balance to try to figure that out.
Got it. That's really helpful. I'll pause here again and see if we have any questions.
Hi, so speaking on the export restrictions on the supply side, is there anything the company is worried about having trouble procuring, specifically materials subject to Chinese export restrictions like gallium or germanium?
In our core business, no. When you look at our supply constraints today, they're really around Gaudi and CoWoS capacity, which is no different than what other players in the industry are seeing. You know, one of the things that I think we do an exceptionally good job at, and probably we don't highlight enough, it's not easy to be at scale in every major region of the world. And we are one of the few companies in any industry that have accomplished that well. And so our supply chain resilience is pretty significant, and we've got plenty of options. And so relative to the core business, there's really nothing coming out of China that gives us too much concern.
Any other questions? John, maybe in the last 3 minutes, anything that we didn't touch that we, we should have, or anything you'd like to highlight on behalf of the Intel team?
No, listen. I think you were pretty exhaustive in sort of the questions, both you and here in the room. I really appreciate the opportunity of being able to spend time with investors. So nothing that I would necessarily add.
Thank you for coming. Really appreciate the time.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.