All right, good morning, everyone. Wow, this is loud. I'll stay back. Great to see everyone. Great to see a crowded room. Melissa, does it sound okay? I'm hearing a little echo. Okay, terrific. Good morning again, and welcome, everyone, to Mizuho's technology conference today. We brought innovators and thought leaders from over 50 leading companies together with over 250 investors to examine the defining industry of our time, technology. We have corporate representation by firms who are driving progress in the sphere of software, semiconductor, fintech, internet, media, and cybersecurity. Each, in their own right, have compelling solutions and business models that provide investment opportunities and differentiations for investors. Our intent is to provide a unique platform where these stories can be showcased and connections can be made with the investment community.
I think we all know that we're living in a period where technological progress is occurring at warp speed and is transforming the way we live, work, and engage. Driving the shift are advancements in foundational technologies, including AI, semiconductor electronics, compute power, and infrastructure solutions, among others. The impact and opportunities presented by AI and edge computing, albeit nascent, are pervasive. This means that some of us, maybe all of us, at some point soon, will be able to personalize our own AI protocols right in the palm of our hands. This significantly ups the game for cybersecurity, data management, chip production, and energy required to power it all. Now, on a more immediate basis, the systems, processes, and industries we have lived and worked with for the last several decades are now being streamlined daily through the application of technology.
This is driving progress and efficiencies for employees, businesses, and investors. A fluid transition from an industrial economy to a digital one requires a balance of both art and science, with one eye on the development and execution of the physical technology. Keynotes and one-on-one meetings. We'll have the pleasure of hearing from tech leaders driving transformational change across the industry, including our keynote speakers, Arvind Krishna, the Chairman and CEO of IBM, and Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Intel Corporation. During today's program, you'll hear from C-suite executives and investors from leading public and private companies who are immersed in the technology landscape. This will give you an opportunity to share the perspectives on navigating the rapidly evolving landscape and explore investment theses. We hope that these conversations will inform important decisions many of you in the audience are facing.
Before we kick off, I do want to take a moment for a couple of thank-yous. So first, thank you to the Mizuho team for the hard work in putting this phenomenal event together. I am incredibly fortunate to work with a talented group of people at a world-class organization. As Mizuho's head of the Investment and Corporate Banking Division, I am proud to be leading one of the fastest-growing investment banks in the world and be recognized as a top-ten investment bank by the Financial Times in 2023. And we're not resting on our laurels. We continue to invest and grow. In 2023, we closed our $550 million acquisition of a premier M&A and restructuring firm, Greenhill, adding 370 talented bankers to our team.
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So a big thank-you to Suhail Patel right here up front, who runs our U.S. equity sales, and Bill Featherston, who joined us this year as Head of Equity Research for their efforts to make this conference a success. We are a platform on the rise and a player to contend with. On behalf of Mizuho Americas, thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Thank you for the clients in the audience, for the trust you put in us, because it is your ongoing support that has landed us in the top-ten position. So just a very quick few housekeeping items before we start the program. As I mentioned, we have a full day of speakers, fireside chats, and one-on-one meetings. For those who are doing one-on-one meetings, they're going to be on the fourth and fifth floor, so take the elevator there.
We'll have this breakfast and lunch keynote in this room. Then from 9:15 A.M. to 11:45 A.M., and then again from 1:15 P.M. to 3:45 P.M., there are going to be three tracks of concurrent corporate fireside chats that are held in different rooms on the second floor. Please check out the agenda for each location. Then at 4:00 P.M., again, we will gather right back in the Grand Salon to hear from prominent investment leaders who will share their viewpoints on investing in [remove] times, areas in tech that they're excited about, where attractive opportunities can be found, and then their outlook for the tech sector in 2024 and beyond. We've allocated time for Q&A at the end of each session and would like for this program to be interactive.
We have mic runners who will hand you the mic, so please share your name, role, company, affiliation prior to asking your question. And finally, we'll conclude the day with a reception right next door on this floor in the networking room. So, hope everyone can join us. Lastly, we do have a few representatives from the press who are in the audience. So, comments made during keynote presentations and fireside chats are on record. Chatham House rules apply to all other parts of the conference, including the receptions, networking area. They remain off the record and are unattributable. So, we very much hope you enjoy the program. We look forward to hearing your questions and connecting with.
Thanks, Michal. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today at the first inaugural Mizuho Tech Conference. Good morning. I'm Vijay Rakesh, Senior Analyst for covering U.S. technology for semiconductor, semicap equipment, and auto technology. Today, I have the pleasure to kick off the conference here with a breakfast keynote from Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Intel Corporation. Safroadu leads Intel's Corporate Strategy and Venture Group, focused on driving growth-oriented strategies, including strategic partnerships, Intel Capital equity investments, and incubation initiatives. Safroadu joined Intel in 2020 from McKinsey & Company, where he was a Senior Partner and Global Head of the Transformation Practice for Telecom, Media, and Technology, TMT. Prior to that, he served as Managing Partner for South Africa and Head of McKinsey's TMT and Digital Practice for Africa, among other roles. Safroadu, thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure. So let's get started.
I think you want to have your presentation.
[Remove].
I'll do a quick safe harbor here, guys. Just take a read through this, but I'll do the abbreviated version here. 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 of the SEC for more information on the risk factors that could cause actual risks or differ materially. Additional information on non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations where appropriate with the corresponding GAAP financial measures. Thank you. You can feel free to read that too. Thanks.
Good morning, Vijay.
Oh, thanks.
Is Saf's microphone working?
Perfect opportunity to take a picture.
Okay. Is it working now? Okay, awesome. Good morning to everybody. Obviously, safe harbor rules. I'm not going to make any news today. I'm going to really spend the time giving sort of behind-the-curtain view of how we've been thinking about Intel's strategy, where we're going, which kind of drive a bunch of the announcements and a bunch of the acquisitions and deals that we've done, as well as some of the investments and how we're thinking about capital allocation. I'm going to go through that in some detail as we talk about our Q&A. I'm really looking forward to the engagement. I joined Intel about three and a half years ago from McKinsey. Intel was a client of mine, so I knew the company quite well. I came in and worked with, as I said, I was the forward deployment for Pat.
So of course, Pat came eight weeks after I joined. And when Pat came, we spent a lot of time as a management team doing two very important things. One is really developing sort of a turnaround strategy for the company. Our view and Pat's view, the board's view, was this is a 10-year journey. It's not a two-year turnaround story because the challenges we faced did not have occurred over quite a long period of time. And the industry takes a long time to turn around because of the cycles. And so we had a 10-year, 10- and 20-year view of the world. And we knew that this was going to be challenging in multiple places. The second thing that we did is we took on a pretty comprehensive assessment of our portfolio.
I spent with our CFO at the time and Pat going through every single component of our portfolio and made a decision, tried to make a decision on whether or not it would fit with our strategy or did not fit with our strategy, and whether or not it was creating shareholder value or whether or not those businesses and assets belonged with somebody else or needed to be exposed to the market. It's a lot of work that we did. Some of the things that we've since done come out of that exercise. But the most important part of the exercise was really thinking about what we call the IDM 2.0 strategy. The IDM 2.0 strategy essentially thinks about the company as two companies in one, two excellent companies in one.
There's the first half of the company, which is really our product operations, and we needed that to be excellent. We felt that it was very clear that our product leadership had waned and that we needed—and in some ways had been—in some times has been held by our process leadership, our technology leadership on the manufacturing side, and vice versa. It was also very clear to us that our manufacturing leadership had waned. What everybody talked about from our manufacturing leadership was obviously our process technology, 10 nanometer, 7 nanometer. But what I think was underappreciated was that our capacity leadership had also waned. For almost 8-9 years, we had not added any capacity into our footprint. This is a fixed-cost business, and obviously having scale and capacity is a strategic asset. Hence leading to our IDM 2.0 strategy.
The other critical part that we spent time on was trying to get our point of view on what it meant to be a great asset to be invested in. Hence the real focus around financial discipline, financial leadership. I think we spend a lot of time as a management team and communicating all the work that we're doing to get to that. Then obviously the foundation of all of this is our people. One of the things that we found three odd years ago was that Intel had lost its mojo a little bit. Internally, the North Star of innovation, driving leadership, really listening to our customers, setting the pace from the open-source ecosystem, driving both software and hardware co- optimization, driving process and product co- optimization had really waned. We needed a cultural transformation to sustain that.
So those are essentially the core principles, the core drivers of what led to the IDM 2.0 strategy. Not for the faint of heart in terms of transformation, because both sides required a huge amount of rethink and revectoring, which we've been doing. Takes time, right? Takes 2 odd years to develop new products, and we kind of redid the whole product roadmap. And it's going to take 4 years, 5 nodes in 4 years to get back to process leadership. The good news is that we feel there's been bumps as in all markets. The market around us changed. Obviously, there's much more competitive intensity in our business. There is geopolitical dynamics that makes we have to navigate.
But at the end of the day, the core of the core of our strategy, which is we have to have product leadership, having manufacturing leadership both in terms of technology and capacity, and continuing to generate the magic of when you have core optimization of our semiconductors with our manufacturing, creating one plus one equals three remains the core of the strategy. And importantly, sorry, to really accelerate this and make this both internally clear, but also externally clear, we've gone down the path of really creating three entities inside Intel. The first, obviously, is the Intel products team. And what we've done is what we've asked ourselves, what we focus on is saying, what would it take to have the most excellent product company on earth at the scale of $55 billion of revenue?
What does it mean in terms of technology, in terms of cost structure, in terms of roadmap? What does it mean in terms of where we focus both in terms of CPUs and GPUs, accelerators, and all of the other technologies that we have? And how do we drive a go-to-market engine that is fit for purpose? And on the other side, we've also created an Intel Foundry that serves both Intel products, but as part of the critical part of the Intel strategy in terms of Intel Foundry strategy, also serves third parties. We know that it took TSMC 20-30 years to create TSMC. It's not lost on us. We know that we need to play differently than just simply going down the path that they've gone to. And hence, we are playing an attacker role in the foundry business.
We're being very focused on leading node capacity. We've been very focused on providing a value proposition around resilience, i.e., having geographic and company resilience when it comes to manufacturing. We also know that we have some critical leadership capabilities that we know the market is going to need and want, including some technical leadership in manufacturing like backside power, but also some really compelling capabilities around packaging, around photonics that we know the market will need as accelerated computing becomes more and more important. That's the focus that we have on Intel Foundry. We also know that the Intel Foundry business, when it was engaged, intertwined with the Intel products business, both sides have become, I wouldn't say lazy, but there was a lot of inefficiencies catching each other that creates a lot of costs, but frankly, missed opportunities.
And so creating this separation both gives the Intel Foundry third-party customers confidence, but more importantly, creates a much better, cleaner, thoughtful, efficient ways for the product organization to work with the foundry organization. And then the third is that we have Intel Corporate. Intel Corporate basically is basically the G&A functions that run the company, manage the company. But in Intel Corporate also are a number of critical capabilities that we have that both Intel Foundry and Intel products leverage. Intel Federal, Intel Labs, which is driving a lot of innovation in the industry. And then obviously Intel Capital, which I run, which does a lot of investments in the ecosystem to both enhance the ecosystem that we work in, but also to drive eyes and ears for the company. And these are really both for both sides.
So we're running these things very separately, and we're going through a process to make sure we're doing this as efficient as possible. In essence, all of the discussions and the announcements we're making and trying to create much more clarity both internally, frankly, and has led to a lot of cost reduction opportunities, but also externally both to customers, both on the foundry side and the product side, but also to our employees. So that is the core of kind of the journey we're on. As I said, we'll talk about some of that now. We're starting to feel we knew this was going to be tough, right? We didn't get there. This is not an easy journey, but we are confident about the assets, capabilities, technologies, and brand that we have.
We feel very confident that the secular trend around compute growth, right, getting to $1 trillion, if you will, in semiconductors, foundry growth, and the need for leading node capacity for most of the fabless companies, and also the need for geopolitical, geodiverse capacity for resilience is a trend that has a huge amount of headroom for shareholder value creation that if we execute, we can reward our investors with. So that's essentially the journey that we're on. With that, I think I've come to the end.
Thanks. Fantastic, Saf. That's very helpful. I just wanted to kick off with some quick questions here. As head of strategy, you also head up Intel Capital, as you mentioned, and you're also in charge of equity investments and incubation opportunities. Where do you see opportunities in Intel, especially on the AI data center compute side, where Intel can invest or do partnerships? Where do you see opportunities to further that roadmap and maybe catch up, as you mentioned?
Great. As you say, I see this from many different sides as an investor in startups, but also shepherding our corporate strategy and working with our business units. I think I'll say two things, and then I'll talk about Intel specifics. First is that Intel has been investing in AI for 15-odd years, right? This has been a huge focus of the company in different parts of AI. And on the data center side, our view, especially around Gen AI, is that we are in the first innings of a nine-inning game. And I can describe that in multiple different dimensions. If you think about the models that are being used, we're starting to get to places where we need fundamentally different ways of modeling and using these foundational models because the scalability and the power consumption is becoming unwieldy.
If you think about making security and accuracy, it's a huge amount of headroom left. The way that I think about it is that these models give you, it's like a high school kid that gets a B plus. It's fantastic for high school, but for enterprises and for doing health research and so on and so forth, you can't afford B plus. You have to have an A plus or at least consistently an A. And so there's a lot of headroom in terms of performance. And then even on the infrastructure side, we think there's a tremendous amount of innovation and work to be done, not just on the accelerator or the CPU side, but also on the networking, which actually today is the biggest bottleneck on memory, and then also on all the other technologies like cooling.
On the data center side, we are obviously investing, and we feel pretty excited about the progress we're making on the accelerator side. But I think what maybe we don't talk a lot about is that we are also investing, and we're very excited about all the innovations and work we're doing on the other bottlenecks, including memory, including networking, and a whole bunch of technologies that we have inside Intel Labs and otherwise around how do you actually run a fleet of CPUs and GPUs, and how do you think about cooling, and how do you think about providing fleet management? In this space, we're super excited about that. And we feel that, and by the way, photonics is also another example of innovation.
We feel that given we're at the beginning, the ground level of this massive explosion, that there are quite a number of opportunities for intersection as we think about our on the client side, AI PC. We continue to believe that there's two problems we're trying to solve. The first problem we're trying to solve is refresh. The refresh rates in the PC industry have gone from 2-3 years to 5-7 years. And obviously, from a time perspective, that's a pretty important issue for us to solve. And so we believe that the AI PC is going to drive another wave of refreshes in the industry, and we're going to drive that using the benefit of AI PC and the need for everybody to have an AI PC to drive that.
I think we think that that's a pretty important trend over the next 5-7 years as kind of the refresh cycle happens again. The second is that we believe that while there is a lot of excitement and a lot of discussion right now, but the current versions of the AI PC, we think this is just the beginning of a journey. The beautiful thing about Gen AI is that it's kind of walking everybody up to the possibilities for both large models, but also small models that are running on your computer. But it's just text, right? What we all know is that innovation at the edge or at the consumption level has to be more than just text. It has to be video, it has to be audio, it has to work with human beings.
There lies in our minds a pretty big headroom in terms of innovation and growth over the next 4, 5 years if the industry with us, obviously being the largest PC player, driving that. And so lots of strategic discussions and thoughts going on on what that could look like, how that works with the ISV ecosystem, and then also what that means from a platform perspective and what we produce.
Got it. I think that's very helpful, especially on the AI data center side and the AI PC side, how that's going to evolve. But talking about competition, obviously, you guys dominate the x86 side. And what you're seeing is Arm is trying to come in both on the data center side and the PC side as well. But then you have a partnership with Arm on the foundry side. So how do you balance that? On the one hand, they're probably trying to eat your lunch. On the other side, you're partnering with them on the foundry side, maybe helping them further their roadmap, I guess. How do you balance that? What do you see down the road? What do you see as a movement there?
So we're a very paranoid organization, right? I think one of our founders famously talked about.
On the paranoid side.
That's how you survive. Number 1. Number 2, you said dominate, I didn't. We don't use that word at Intel. Number 3, what I'd say is we deeply believe that x86 and the innovations around x86 has been a huge benefit to the world in driving compute capacity and cost down using obviously Moore's Law and other innovations. And we believe there's still a lot of headroom in that innovation. Having said that, we think there's a place for ARM-based architectures. We think there is a place for ARM-based architectures in different parts of the compute ecosystem. And we're very excited to, from a product perspective, compete with it. We believe that especially on the CPU side, we know how to make server-class CPUs.
And we know so many things about that space that once our roadmap that we have comes to bear, that we are confident competing for. There's all kinds of technologies around fleet management, around memory management, around power management, around that we've learned painfully over the last 10 years, 15, 20 years, that we think gives us an advantage as long as obviously we meet the threshold around the product being compelling. And so we're excited to have that battle, and we think it's good for the industry. We also think that part of the reason that the ARM-based server chips have become popular is frankly because of us, right?
We are not as responsive to the market as we probably should have been around the CSPs needing different types of offerings because we felt pretty confident that what we were going to offer was going to solve all their problems. And so I think we are excited about the opportunity to compete. And if we don't win all the sockets, we're totally excited about them coming to Intel Foundry to fight it. On the client side, I think this is actually a multi-year decade story around Arm coming into the PC environment. Again, we think the question is not Arm versus it's not an RTL issue. It's a product leadership issue.
We feel pretty confident that our product roadmap on the client side, again, as we start seeing Lunar Lake and Panther Lake, that the combination of the product leadership with our go-to-market engine and our marketing engine and our channel engine and frankly our scale combined with our ability to really deliver enterprise-grade systems, right? Again, that allows for manageability, allows for remote. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that enterprises require before they buy. We believe that that, obviously, with the bar being great products, gets us back into competing.
How do you balance that with being a foundry partner for Arm?
We're totally comfortable with that. We think that we will not win every socket. We really also believe that there's a whole bunch of edge applications, phone applications, a lot of form factors which x86 is not going to intercept. We want to make sure that our foundry business is ready to intercept all of those. In many ways, why the separation is incredibly important because we don't want to constrain the foundry business with the product business.
Got it. That's very helpful. Just to go on the unlocking value path, I guess. One of the things that when Pat came in, he said was, "We want to unlock value." And one of the things that he started off with was Mobileye. I think you guys still have it as a subsidiary now. You announced Altera as well, I guess. What's the path forward on that? And where else do you see opportunities where you can there is a much bigger value of that entity as a standalone or the market can appreciate that a lot better, the growth there? What are the opportunities ahead? If you can start with Altera and then maybe.
Sure. The Mobileye transaction, or I think it came out of the portfolio review that I talked about where we decided that there were quite a number of assets that would be more valuable or would unlock a lot of shareholder value by having externally. We don't talk a lot about the IMS, for example, which is another asset that we believed that we had that we believed was more of an industry asset than just a captive access that we sold an equity stake in, which is another example. And then Altera is another example where we feel very passionately that it makes sense as a standalone entity. And there's a lot of, we announced it, a lot of work going on. And obviously, it all depends on timing, what I've realized. I used to be a consultant.
I didn't really realize that timing was so important in the equity market. But it's all depending on timing and pricing. And obviously, the industry is going through a bit of a correction or resetting post-pandemic. But we are pretty excited about either doing a stake sale or an IPO and weighing all those options. In terms of beyond that, I'll say 3 or 4 things. One, and I think Pat mentioned this, we've sold 5 or 6, maybe 7 assets in the portfolio already. We shut down because we think that's also value creation, a number of businesses inside the company that we felt shareholders were not going to get a return on.
We continue to look at multiple different assets and options where we believe we spun out a company called Articul8, which was an internal organization that is now a business that Intel Capital owns a large portion of that is doing incredibly well. We're very focused on looking at every opportunity. We think there's five or six more that we're going to consider.
That's very helpful. Just, I know you started off with the foundry strategy. And I think you guys have something called Smart Capital or I believe the SCIP Semiconductor Co-Investment Program, I guess. How do you see that evolving? Because I think you announced a pretty remarkable Apollo partnership with Ireland fab, pretty major $11 billion investment from them. But then you pulled back on Israeli fab in the last couple of days. But just wondering, is that the roadmap forward that you want to have a co-investment as you put out the next round of fabs? Or how do you see that evolving, I guess, the whole SCIP program? And I'm sure it's part of Intel Capital as well, so.
Yeah. So I think let me just broadly say that the Smart Capital, which Dave, our CFO, owns, is very focused on leveraging fit for purpose on capital. It has three components to it. The first is we build shells ahead of demand. We don't build factories ahead of demand. A shell, if it's a factory, is $20 billion. A shell is about 15%-20% of that. And it buys you essentially an option. The rest is the equipment and the power and all the other stuff that you actually put in. And so number one part of the Smart Capital is that we don't want to be in a place where we can't get capacity, but we also don't want to spend $20 billion buying it. So that's incredibly important.
The second part of the Smart Capital strategy is we want to leverage capital to do these build-outs in the most efficient way possible. The first, obviously, is we'd love to get grants and support from governments, especially where we think it makes sense. And that's one critical part of the Smart Capital part. I think we made an announcement around what we think that will project for the company over the next 5, 7 years as we build out. That's obviously incredibly important. The second is we have been approached by multiple. I cut my teeth in the telecom industry. The telecom industry has been very successful in partnering with capital markets to fund core infrastructure. And so SCIP basically came out of that where we felt that quite a lot of the infrastructure that we fund is things that are not even telecom, I mean, tech-related, right?
The construction of the roads, the construction of the buildings, the construction of the power. These are all assets that Intel, we should not be using our balance sheet for. So part of the whole SCIP structure is to essentially have Intel pay the equipment and our partner pay for the "infrastructure" and us to, in a joint venture way, drive the business, pay for the investment out of the profits of the factory. That's the simple way of thinking about it. That's what we did with Brookfield. That's what the structure with Apollo strategically is trying to do. Will we do more of these? I think we will always look for alternative capital. We're very, very jealous of our balance sheet.
And so we will look for multiple different ways to get more leverage out of the balance sheet if we can, obviously in a prudent way, in a way where it's not too expensive, and in a way in which we are where investors who are interested in taking equity risk with us or taking business risk with us because they believe in the sort of the secular investment cycle that we're in, that we'd consider.
So SCIP, as I see it, is your own private initiative. So that plus CHIPS Act would be a help for you. That'd be completely separate. On the SCIP side, do you see partnering not just with private equity like Apollo, but also with customers like hyperscalers or big IDMs?
Short answer is yes.
Got it. Okay. And that's more like in the pipeline kind of.
Yeah. These are all things that we've had incomings and we also have thought about that we actually because there are some clear fabless companies who will want customization and certainty of supply. And how do you do that if that means that they co-invest with us in the factory, if they give us a prepayment, large prepayment in order to secure capacity? We would consider all of those things.
That's the whole onshoring strategic supply kind of.
That's all part of Smart Capital.
Yeah. I want to quickly go back and look at if you look at Intel itself, you are pushing on a couple of three or four different verticals simultaneously. You have the whole data center going on with Genoa and not Genoa, sorry, Sapphire Rapids and Granite Rapids and all that. You have the AI PC side going on. You have AI going on with Gaudi 2, Gaudi 3. And then you have the whole foundry strategy, which is a whole different universe. How do you balance this? How do you prioritize it? Do you see any risk when you are running multiple strategies at the same time? Obviously, investors want to see you succeed. But how are you planning on prioritizing all the different strategies?
It's a great question. Something that we think about a lot. I think the way that we have two very important notions. One is simplify the company. The structure of kind of having two companies in one or three operations in one, I think helps a lot. So we have two management teams. One management team that is focused 100% on making Intel Foundry successful. They don't think one minute about the product side of the house. We have a management team that is 100% focused on making the product side successful. They don't think about, they think about the foundry side as their supplier. Very close supplier, but their supplier. That separation helps create clarity. The second one is that we've been maniacally focused on in the foundry side on getting 18A and 14A working and getting one or two large foundry customers.
And so it's incredibly simple in that way. On the product side, we have been maniacally focused on getting the next generation products on the data center side, on the CPU side, and on the client side, which is very, very clear, right? Lunar Lake and Diamond Rapids, with obviously Clearwater Forest also being a very important product. Done right. Because we feel that those are the things that we monitor. And if we can get those things done right and on time with what we think the performance will be. So that's how we have six things we monitor in the company all the time. We have the top six jobs. And that's how we're driving it.
Got it. Fantastic. I would like to take some questions from the audience. There's a couple of microphones around, so maybe if you want to ask some questions, here's your opportunity. As the head of strategy, there you go.
Thanks, Uncertain . I wanted to quickly talk a little bit about your next-generation product, Granite Rapids. You talked about your confidence about where that's going to be relative to AMD or competition, how you want to describe that. And when do we actually kind of see you, to your point, get the products back where they need to be to get maybe just competitive on average servers and then AI customers?
Can you quickly introduce yourself to us?
Yes. Sorry. Steve Smigie. I'm with Raymond James (Uncertain)
Okay.
I didn't hear the second half of that question. I heard about the product leadership relative to, I think you said, Genoa or whoever.
Granite Rapids versus.
Okay.
That product where, say, Enterprise Class or competitive now. And then what's the product where you're like, "Yeah, I'm going to go to the chips in the data center with NVIDIA or whatever.
Yeah, that's a great question. In the spirit of not, I'm not here to make news. Here's what I would say. Granite Rapids and Diamond Rapids are two products that we were able to modify, change, and improve post-Pat showing up. They are products that are designed with a different mindset and a different set of vectors around product leadership. So we feel that they both get to parity on certain critical things, but also real leadership on certain critical things. Obviously, we focused on our performance. We focused on cost. We focused on throughput, right? Given this is a scalar type workloads that in general that we're focused on. Then we focused on what I'd call manageability, all the things that our customers care about to be able to take on our product and run it as a fleet.
We feel very confident on Granite. We feel even more confident on Diamond. Okay? I think that's a fair great answer. I couldn't hear your second part of your question.
Steve?
It's working now. So I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but is it like, "Hey, we're pretty enterprise class is not the same as what the folks at the hyperscalers need." Do you think you're pretty close at parity in next generation for server class? And that's kind of in the bag. You're done. You're ready to go. Not going to lose share anymore. And then you're maybe a generation behind, call it a year behind on what has to go into the data center to kind of stop losing share there.
Does it Granite Rapids-specific point?
It doesn't have to be Granite Rapids. That was kind of the product that had seemed like a couple of years ago seemed like, "Hey, this one has a reasonable chance of kind of hitting what we need to get to." And I feel like it fell behind again, but.
Yeah. I don't know if I will make a point around share. I think that there are many other things that go into share. What I will say is that Granite Rapids and Diamond Rapids make us very confident that we can compete very effectively with both our traditional competitors and our new competitors.
All right. Thanks, Steve. Any other questions? There you go. On the background. And I think you threw in photonics/optical. Do we need a materials transition, you think, to sort of deal with these issues, kind of the materials issues that the industry is coming up against?
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is, and we're working on it, as I said, right? So for my sense, the photonics business actually for Intel works for me is in my shop because we're going through a transformation of it. What I would say is what we're finding for all the work that we're doing is that the big bottleneck is on networking and access to memory. And there are different paths to try and solve that. One path, obviously, is to fix the connectivity problem. And photonics is a fantastic way of doing that, which means you have to get into co-packaging and a whole bunch of things that we're working on, that the industry is working on. There's other ways to solve the problem, which is more on the wafer side, right? So you could do it.
You could use glass as an example as a material to solve that. Again, this is something that I think we've made public that we're spending a lot of time on, and we have capabilities through labs and through our and then there's another way of solving it, which is more at a system level of a pod or a cluster, which is kind of where NVIDIA has traditionally given all of the huge demand they've had on their clusters, is solving it, which is with networking and better types of networking and better algorithms for networking. So it's a long-winded way of saying, yes, we need new materials, but I think there are lots of different vectors trying to address this issue.
And it's probably going to be all of the above because the huge growth and the reality is that in these AI clusters, the GPUs are sitting around waiting for quite a lot. And so how do you get the GPUs closer to memory, or how do you get the GPUs really physically virtualized using photonics, or how do you actually architect the system so that you can use the GPUs and the CPUs in a very different way? These are, as what I was saying at the beginning, which is we are kind of very early on in how, at a system level, at a chip level, and at a networking level, how AI systems and AI platforms are going to be built.
These are all the things that we are kind of working on that we believe we have, based upon our history, quite a lot of goodies to bring to the discussion.
All right. Any other questions? Saf, I think you had talked a lot about the hardware side, chip design, foundry, etc., etc. Not much on the software side. What's happening on the software side? And where do you see opportunities there? Where do you see the build-out partnerships? I think Michael would like to know.
Yeah. So we think about software in two very different ways. We think about the software at the, call it the orchestration layer, orchestration of hardware layer. And there, we think there continues to be quite a lot of opportunity, both on the PC side as well as on the kind of the data center side, to better orchestrate infrastructure that is deployed. And this is kind of our bread and butter. It's upstreaming capabilities of the hardware into the higher layers of the stack. It is driving better security. So we invest in a lot in security in terms of protecting at the chip level or at the system level security. So that whole area, we think, is a pretty big focus. And there's a guy called Greg Lavender who is focused on that. We think that's a lot of opportunity.
If you go higher in the stack, quote-unquote, "above the frameworks," we also believe that, and we're, as Intel Capital, investing a lot in two different places. The first place is on the enterprise side, where we believe that the enterprises are still really struggling with an easy button for deploying AI systems for on-prem deployment and use in a secure way. And we think that there's a whole ecosystem that needs to be put in place to drive. And we are actively working with the ecosystem to try and create that as a real alternative, as a real sort of easy button to drive. And then on the client side, we think there's a, obviously, in partnership with our best friends, Microsoft, we think there is quite still a lot of innovation and software work to be done to really make the AI PC hum.
Obviously, data center side too.
Also on the data center side. On the data center side, I think the CSPs are making a huge amount of investment.
Something like a CUDA or a ROCm from AMD. Yep. Got it. Fantastic. Saf, I think that brings us to the end of our slots. So really appreciate the time.
Thank you.