As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. Now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Mr. John Pitzer, Corporate Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Jonathan, and good afternoon to everyone joining us today. By now, you should have received a copy of the Q3 earnings release and presentation. Both are available on our investor relations website, intc.com. For those joining us online today, the presentation is also available in our webcast window. I'm joined today by our CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, and our CFO, Dave Zinsner.
Lip-Bu will open on comments on third quarter results and progress on our strategic priorities. Dave will then discuss overall financial results, including fourth quarter guidance before we transition to answer your questions. Before we begin, please note that today's presentation does contain forward-looking statements based on the environment as we currently see it. As such, they are subject to various risks and uncertainties. It also contains references to non-GAAP financial measures that we believe provide useful information to our investors.
Our earnings release, most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and other filings with the SEC provide more information on specific risk factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from our expectations. They also provide additional information on our non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliation where appropriate to our corresponding GAAP financial measures. With that, let me turn it over to Lip-Bu.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. The demand environment in Q3 was more balanced than previous quarters. Strong momentum in DCAI drove upside and enabled the strongest revenue growth for the segment in 15 years. This was partially offset by weakness in CCPG, driven by the industry-wide impacts from higher memory prices and limited IT budgets.
The industry continues to navigate one of the most significant supply shortages in the history, driven by the unprecedented demand for super intelligence. Against this backdrop, I am pleased by the progress we make growing our server supply in Q3. I am mindful about the ongoing challenges we face in the future quarters to keep pace with the server demand. The successful completion of our equity offering in August provided us with the necessary financial resources to capture the growth ahead.
I am very pleased to add new sovereign funds and long-term growth investor in addition to our existing shareholders. We are deploying this capital quickly and prudently. We expect CapEx and purchase commitments for key components to increase significantly over the next several quarters. I want to thank our substrate memory foundry equipment suppliers for their strong partnership and collaborations as we work together to expand supply and support growing demands.
Turning to business units. First, DCAI. Within our server business, we are making steady progress on our roadmap. Granite Rapids on Intel 3 has become one of the fastest-ramping server products. Clearwater Forest, our first Intel 18A server products, is shipping for revenue. Demand for 2027 is significant, especially in CPU dense agentic rack scale infrastructure.
Diamond Rapids, our first Intel 18A-P server product, is sampling and on track to ramp in 2027 with strong interest for inference and agentic workloads. We were pleased to recently announce an agreement with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to deploy our latest generation CPUs to support their AI build-out. I also want to acknowledge headwinds limiting our progress to meet this extremely high AI-driven demand.
First, Intel 3 yield and cycle time continue to improve, but I am demanding significant execution from the team. Second, even as our Intel 3 wafer outputs ramps quickly, an industry-wide shortage of advanced organic substrates for our EMIB packaging is also impacting our ability to scale output. Finally, early this month, an unfortunate and tragic accident led to an extended shutdown in our Israel factory.
While the teams have worked quickly to address the situation, it will impact our Q4 10-nanometer server shipments. Purpose-built silicon remains our fastest-growing business segment, tripling over the last three years and poised to triple again over the next few years. We see further growth opportunity with both existing and new potential customers, including AI labs, and expanding our IP portfolio to meet the needs of a wider array of customers.
Lastly, we recently unveiled our Intel GPU D-Series inference-optimized GPU. Early feedback is encouraging. Performance is tracking well. This is new market for us, and it will take time to scale, but customer engagements are progressing towards firm commitments. Turning to our client business, in recent weeks, our customers began signaling a PC slowdown based on the memory prices and availability. Year-to-date system endpoint prices have increased significantly, placing additional pressure on already limited IT budgets.
The pace of this PC correction has accelerated over the last two months as our OEM partners are aggressively managing inventory to match the softer sell-through. We expect the current environment to persist until memory availability and prices begin to normalize. While the next few quarters will be challenging for the PC market, our roadmap continues to strengthen, and our long-term outlook remains positive.
We have successfully ramped Panther Lake on Intel 18A, and demand for the Wildcat Lake is outstripping supply. Nova Lake, our first Intel 18A-P client product, is tracking ahead of schedule, with design wins expected to be twice those of Panther Lake at launch. We look forward to sharing more at CES in January. As the market normalizes, we expect this portfolio drives meaningful share gains. Intel Foundry execution continued to improve consistently.
During the quarter, Intel 3 and Intel 18A yields both increased again, with Intel 18A improving at a double-digit rate. Wafer output on both nodes exceeded expectations. Intel 18A-P remains on track for launch by year-end across our internal product portfolio, and external customer engagement continues to build. We are engaged with a couple of highly strategic customers, and I am increasingly confident that our Intel 18A-P will be an attractive node for external foundry customers.
Intel 14A also remains on track. in October, as committed, we released our industry-standard 0.9 PDK to select customers. It is our highest quality 0.9 PDK, meeting industry standard yield and performance criteria at release. As is standard practice in the foundry business, I have consistently maintained that we will not disclose customer details. That being said, I remain highly encouraged by the progress we are making with multiple potential customers on 14A.
On advanced packaging, we are pleased by the progress we are making with EMIB and EMIB-T for our internal products. Both continue to see significant external customer traction as well. We continue to improve on execution, working with our supply chain to secure the capacity to meet the needs of our advanced packaging customers.
We are also seeing robust progress in the readiness of HBI, which is an enabler of 3D chip stacking for our upcoming server products. Across our manufacturing network, additional capacity continues to come online. Intel 3 tool installation is progressing well in Ireland, as is in the ramp of the 18A in both Oregon and Arizona, including Fab 62, our second high-volume 18A fab. In New Mexico and Malaysia, we are adding capacity to support strong customer ramps for advanced packaging next year.
In New Albany, Ohio, the team recently achieved important construction milestone with installation of the first major structural truss. And we continue to evaluate unique and highly differentiated opportunity to accelerate our Ohio build-out. And I hope to share more on this in the near future. Looking to the future, I have always emphasized that rebuilding Intel is going to be multi-year journey. And I remain firmly committed to making it happen.
We are only one year and a half into this journey. We have made enormous strides in this 18 months, including a dramatic resizing of our workforce, eliminating middle management and bureaucracy, streamlining our executive ranks, and established an almost entirely new leadership team. We have installed once again an engineering-centric culture, streamlining our product portfolio and put in place a more competitive roadmap for Intel products and Intel Foundry. We still have much more to do.
The resurgence in demand for CPU is meaningful tailwind for us along our transformation journey. Increasingly, energy efficiency is becoming the most important metric for the AI infrastructure build-out. While GPUs are great at thinking tasks, deterministic CPU are far more efficient at doing tasks. While GPU reasoning query run as high as multiple watt-hours of energy, a single CPU query could cost only joules of energy.
Applying even conservative estimates to the total number of digital agents and agents served per CPU, it is easy to anticipate a massive dollar and unit TAM for CPUs over the coming five years. By our estimates, server CPU TAM, largely driven by agentic workloads, could increase as much as five times from where it is today, from $40 billion to more than $200 billion over five years. This makes the opportunity for Intel enormous.
We are, of course, mindful of fierce competition underway as nearly every fabless company race to meet this unprecedented demand with their own offering. But Intel is uniquely positioned to benefit from this demand in three ways. First, as a custodian of x86, the most widely deployed ISA in the world, we are doubling down on x86 innovation, have an exciting Tick-Tock roadmap of CPU innovations in the pipeline.
In addition, for the first time, we are making fully modular, verified instances of our x86 CPUs optimized for the custom workloads available to our customers. Second, as one of the just three advanced node semiconductor foundries in the world, and the only one domiciled in the U.S., we are well positioned to support not only our own demand but also the demands of wider fabless industry.
We are also open to building any CPUs at scale for our customers fully agnostic to underlying ISA. Third, as modern computing platforms increasingly become complex system in the package, our leadership in advanced packaging offers highly differentiated solution, especially to meet the requirements of the massive AI infrastructure build-out underway.
This is why I remain optimistic on the opportunities ahead for Intel, even as we have works to do. Lastly, while we remain focused on executing against our near-term priorities, we cannot lose sight of what come next. Intel has a deep portfolio of technology and IP that positions us to drive the next wave of computing. We continue to invest in breakthrough technologies, including silicon photonics, neuromorphic computing, advanced materials, and quantum computing that we believe can unlock the important of new opportunities over time.
This week, we announced our intent to acquire Classiq, an Israel-based quantum software provider, moving our quantum efforts from foundational research towards commercialization. Classiq's overarching hardware-agnostic software platform layer provides a gateway for more consumers to explore quantum computing.
It is a wonderful complement to our already strong internal quantum hardware and software stacks and enable us to further extend our compute platform offerings to include QPUs in addition to CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs. Post-acquisition, Intel will become a full stack revenue-generating quantum computing company. In summary, while we did well in Q3, there's clearly more work to do.
I'm disappointed that we were not able to meet strong customer demand in this quarter. We face near-term challenges, including manufacturing supply shortage, the unprecedented memory crunch, and the resulting softness in PC demand. But I remain confident in our path forward.
We need to address these challenges with urgency without losing sight of the massive opportunity in front of us. I want to thank our employees, partners, and suppliers for their tireless effort in this quarter. With that, I will turn the call over to Dave for additional details.
Thank you, Lip-Bu. We delivered a strong quarter, exceeding our guidance for revenue, gross margin, and earnings per share. This marks the eighth consecutive quarter of exceeding our financial expectations. Our Q3 results reinforce the essential role our server CPUs play in the build-out of super intelligence or AI infrastructure. Results also demonstrate our improving execution as we grow supply to capture the strong demand for AI compute.
Third quarter revenue was $16.5 billion, led by record year-over-year growth in DCAI. Strong execution across our factory network and external supply chain drove better than expected server CPU output. This strength was partially offset by weakness in client, where industry-wide PC consumption is being impacted by memory shortages and limited IT budgets. Third quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 44.1%, approximately 200 basis points higher than Q2 in our guidance.
The sequential improvement was driven by improved costs on Intel 3 and Intel 18A, and a more favorable product mix. Third quarter non-GAAP EPS was $0.52, compared with our guidance of $0.38. The upside was driven by higher revenue, stronger gross margin, and disciplined spending, which together produced better than expected operating leverage. Operating cash flow was $5.91 billion.
We ended the quarter with approximately $54 billion in cash and short-term investments, in addition to $15 billion of borrowing capacity under our new extended revolvers, up from $10 billion previously. In early August, we further strengthened our balance sheet through a $23 billion equity offering. The incremental interest income associated with the offering contributed approximately $0.01 to Q3 EPS that was not contemplated in our original guidance. Now moving to segment results. DCAI revenue was $7.3 billion, up 17% sequentially and nearly 80% year over year.
Revenue was meaningfully ahead of our expectations as our factory network and external suppliers supported higher output. The work our teams have done to increase supply is having a tangible impact. Based on our current outlook, DCAI revenue is on track to finish 2026 nearly $10 billion above expectations entering the year. Q3 growth was broad-based across hyperscale, enterprise, and Neo Cloud customers.
We also continued to see strong momentum in purpose-built silicon, with revenue increasing more than 50% sequentially and more than doubling year over year. Despite our progress to increase capacity, demand for DCAI products continues to meaningfully exceed available supply. DCAI operating profit was $3 billion, representing 42% of revenue and increasing approximately $600 million sequentially. The improvement was driven by higher revenue and lower operating expenses.
Granite Rapids is now the largest product family in our server portfolio as we continue to increase output from our Ireland facility. Earlier this month at the Open Compute Project Global Summit, we demonstrated select Clearwater Forest configurations that scale beyond 46,000 cores per rack at approximately 133 kilowatts of total rack power, delivering best-in-class performance per watt. We also introduced the Intel GPU D-Series, formerly code-named Crescent Island, which is designed to improve the economics of sustained memory-intensive AI inference.
Customer interest in both product families is running ahead of our initial expectations. CCPG revenue was $8.1 billion, down 9% sequentially and below our expectations. We previously noted that memory shortages could pressure the second half PC TAM. That pressure intensified during Q3, particularly late in the quarter, and resulted in a meaningful adjustment in customer purchasing patterns. Despite the near-term weakness, we saw several positive developments.
Our AI PC revenue grew 35% year-over-year, even as total CCPG revenue declined 5%. Our client products on Intel 18A continue to ramp well. Wildcat Lake, our cost-optimized Intel 18A client CPU, increased units by approximately 70% sequentially and is sold out. Lastly, our Edge business was more resilient, supported by continued momentum in Edge and physical AI design wins. CCPG operating profit was $2.3 billion, representing 28% of revenue and approximately flat sequentially, primarily due to lower inventory charges.
Turning to Intel Foundry. Intel Foundry revenue was $6.7 billion, up 16% sequentially, driven by better-than-expected growth on Intel 3 and Intel 18A. External foundry revenue was $411 million, an increase of $118 million sequentially, primarily due to a non-recurring customer program.
Intel Foundry reported an operating loss of $1.9 billion, an improvement of $236 million sequentially, even as we continue to invest aggressively to prepare Intel 14A for risk production next year. Higher yields, better cycle times, and increased factory utilization continue to reduce wafer costs. Intel 3 costs improved approximately 15% from Q1 levels, while volumes increased in the mid-teens sequentially. Intel 18A costs have declined approximately 40% since Q1, reflecting continued yield and cycle time improvements.
Intel 18A yields continue their upward trajectory to industry-standard levels ahead of our internal projections. Since Q1, Intel 18A client CPUs have grown from less than 5% of revenue to now nearly one-third of client CPU revenue. These results represent meaningful progress, although we still have considerable work ahead of us to deliver a sustainably profitable foundry business. Now turning to outlook. Demand signals from our data center customers continue to strengthen.
We expect the industry to remain supply constrained throughout 2027 and into 2028. As Lip-Bu discussed, the adoption of agentic AI is broadening the role of CPU compute. AI workloads are moving beyond prompt-based responses toward multi-step reasoning, orchestration, and autonomous persistent action. Our CPUs play a central role in enabling these workloads. As a result, we continue to see strong demand for our DCAI products.
We now expect industry server CPU units to grow more than 30% in both 2026 and 2027. Growth would be higher in both years if additional industry supply were available. At the same time, the PC market is weakening after remaining resilient during the first half of 2026. We expect the 2026 PC unit TAM to decline approximately 12%, with second-half units down more than 20%. We do not expect a sustained recovery until memory availability improves and pricing begins to normalize.
For 2027, we're planning for the PC unit TAM to decline roughly 10%. We expect year-over-year declines to be more pronounced during the first half, with the potential for improvement in the second half against an easier comparison. Our longer-term view of the PC market remains unchanged. Traditional PCs will play an important role in enabling AI applications and driving strong returns on AI infrastructure spending. In addition, we're just now seeing new agentic systems in the market.
We also continue to see attractive longer-term opportunities in Edge and physical AI as agentic applications spread across the economy. Taking these factors together, we're guiding Q4 revenue to a range of $15 billion-$16 billion. At the midpoint of $15.5 billion, we expect a gross margin of 38%, a tax rate of 11%, and EPS of $0.25, all on a non-GAAP basis.
Our guidance includes an impact of roughly $300 million to revenue and 200 basis points to gross margin based on our early assessment of the incident at Fab 28. By segment, we expect DCAI revenue to grow mid-teens percent sequentially, with purpose-built silicon growing faster than DCAI overall. Please note, almost all of the $300 million impact from Fab 28 is related to 10-nanometer server products.
We expect CCPG revenue to decline greater than 20% sequentially as customers move quickly to reduce weeks of inventory and align purchases with their expectations for 2027 consumption. The sequential decline in Q4 gross margin primarily reflects lower overall revenue against our fixed cost base as we adjust client wafer starts to current demand conditions. In addition, revenue mix, especially the strong growth expected in purpose-built silicon, is creating difficult quarter-on-quarter compares.
These headwinds will be partially offset by continued yield and cost improvements on Intel 3 and 18A. We expect non-GAAP operating expenses of approximately $4.4 billion in Q4 and approximately $16.3 billion for the full year. We expect non-controlling interest, or NCI, to be approximately $250 million in Q4, and we currently expect NCI of approximately $1.1 billion in both 2027 and 2028.
Lastly, we expect Q4 fully diluted share count of 5.44 billion, representing a full quarter of shares issued for our August equity offering. Moving to CapEx. Our 2026 gross capital expenditures remains on track to be $20 billion, and we expect 2027 gross capital spending to be up strongly. We have made good progress securing the equipment required to support our growth plans with firm purchase orders to equipment suppliers increasing nearly 40% sequentially.
We're also accelerating clean room build-outs, including Fab 62 in Arizona, and exploring opportunities to accelerate in Ohio. Despite this increase in capital spending and working capital, we remain committed to deleveraging in 2027. We will remain disciplined as we invest, and we will not spend a dollar of capital unless we have confidence in the health of our products and process technologies and clear evidence of customer demand.
Our confidence in all three is improving. In closing, I want to offer a few words outlining the opportunity we see ahead. Our core server CPU market is growing faster than ever, and edge and physical AI represent meaningful incremental opportunities for client class CPUs, even as we navigate the current market conditions. Importantly, as we improve our product execution and roadmap, we have opportunities to regain share and grow even faster than our underlying markets.
Beyond our Core x86 franchise, we are investing in three large opportunities where we have meaningful momentum but relatively modest revenue today: purpose-built silicon, advanced packaging, and external wafer foundry. Each represents tens of billions of dollars of new markets where our technology, manufacturing assets, and customer relationships provide us a differentiated opportunity to participate. Taken together, we have line of sight to long-term double-digit revenue growth with meaningful leverage and improving margins.
We have significant work ahead of us. However, the combination of stronger markets and the cultural changes set into motion by Lip-Bu to improve execution, transparency, and discipline gives us increasing confidence in Intel's long-term earnings power and free cash flow growth, a solid foundation for building sustainable shareholder value. With that, I'll turn it over to John to begin the Q&A.
Thank you, Dave. As a reminder, please ask one question and a brief follow-up in order to allow us to accommodate as many callers as possible. With that, Jonathan, can we take the first question?
Certainly. Our first question comes from the line of Timothy Arcuri from UBS. Your question, please.
Thanks a lot. Dave, I am wondering, with all the puts and takes and what is going on in PC, I am wondering if you can give us maybe some guardrails, maybe you could say it, next year. It seems like DCAI could grow $10 billion-$15 billion year-over-year, but PC, I am guessing, is maybe down a touch. Can you just maybe give us guardrails for the year and sort of how to think about the shape of the year?
Yeah. Thanks, Tim. I am not obviously going to guide next year, but maybe I will give you some qualitative information. I would say at a high level, we see next year as a growth year. We feel like the momentum that we saw in data center this quarter and taking away the impact from Israel, that momentum would have continued into the fourth quarter. We see that continuing next year. The only little nuance is the first half of the year, we are still a bit constrained. We talked about putting 40% more capacity in substrates, but a lot of that does not hit us until the back half of the year.
In addition, we are still constrained on Intel 3, and we're going to work towards moving, as Lip-Bu said, some of our supply into Oregon, but it's going to take a while before that comes out of the fab and gets into products. But we're very optimistic and enthusiastic about the opportunities for us next year in terms of growth on the data center business. In addition, we talked about within DCAI, we also have purpose-built silicon.
That business has been growing at a 3x rate over the last three years. We see that growing at a 3x rate in the next three years. We're really bullish about that throughout 2027. Obviously, the client is going to be the most difficult to call. As I talked about, we see TAM declining in 2026 by about 12% on a unit basis.
We think that's going to be about 10% next year on a unit basis. That will be one dynamic. There's going to be this kind of inventory correction. We're in the throes of that right now. We felt a little bit of it in the third quarter. We're going to feel a lot of it in the fourth quarter.
We think it extends at least out into the first quarter. After that, I think you'll start to see the inventory correction part of this start to wane, and we'll be back into more of what's going to go on on the TAM side, which, as I said, we're thinking about 10% down. The one added piece of this is we come into next year with Nova Lake as our product offering, and we think this is the best set of products we've had in a very long time.
We think it covers the gamut of what's required to participate in client. We're very excited about it. We think next year and in the future years, we're in a kind of a market share gain type of environment for our clients. Obviously unfortunate that we've run into this challenge on the memory side and its impact on client, but we are very enthusiastic about the product set.
You didn't ask this question, but I'll just extend it out beyond this year. We do think that the PC is going to go through a renaissance despite this. We think that as AI workloads start to shift around, there's going to be a lot of workload required in the client space, either as a PC or as some kind of agentic box. We do see this market as being pretty interesting. It's got to obviously get through this bit of challenge that we have, but longer term, feel really good about the market.
Tim, do you have a quick follow-up question?
I do, yeah. Dave, you did say that CapEx is going to be up a lot next year. I think a lot of us are thinking kind of like $30 billion, but I guess the real question is: Are you committed to generating free cash flow next year, or do you think because of the CapEx burden that that will be hard? Thanks.
Yeah, it is a good question. We have not exactly locked into the number. We do not do that until we get towards the end of this year. But we have a directional understanding of what is likely to happen. And we have been putting POs in place with equipment vendors given the lead time, so we have some sense of what is going to happen.
I think next year is an investment year for us as we look at the year. Probably not a dynamic where we are going to have positive free cash flow next year, but it is because we see this as a tremendous opportunity to invest into the growth. And one thing that we have seen is you make the right investments, you ramp the node in the right way, you see profitability, and you see return on invested capital.
We talked about this as we were doing the equity offering at the beginning of August, that we think we should be getting at least 20% ROI on all of these nodes as we invest in them. But next year is going to be one of those years where there's a couple of things going on at the same time. We're ramping 18A, we're ramping Intel 3 to some extent, and we're making the appropriate investments to position 14A to begin production in 2028.
That's a lot of investment all hitting us in one year. So I don't think that this will be a year in which we see positive cash flow. By the way, that is why we raised the money that we did at the beginning of August, was to get ourselves positioned to do this. Longer term, though, these businesses generate lots of cash flow.
If you look at Intel 7 today, kind of 10 nanometer 7, that's already a profitable node to us. Intel 3 is going to be profitable next year for us. So we know we can make these businesses profitable. We know we can generate good cash flow from them. We know we can get 20% return. We just got to get through what is basically a knothole here in 2027 to go realize that.
Thanks, Tim. Jonathan, can we have the next question, please?
Certainly. Our next question comes from the line of Ben Reitzes from Melius. Your question please.
Yeah. Thanks a lot, guys. I wanted to ask about some of the issues that you noted for Q4 and that may linger into Q1 and see if you can size them versus prior expectations, and then when they get better. You cited execution. Obviously, the Israel situation, which is $300 million, wondering what that is going to be in the quarters after that and when that is solved, and sorry that happened, by the way.
And then the client, and in the context that the guide is about $1.8 billion below the street. Maybe you can go through those three things, how big they are to the cut of $1.8 billion, and when they get better, that would be great. Thanks a lot.
Yeah. So Israel, the client, and what was the third one?
Just relative to the guide and street.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so.
The execution, Dave. There was an actual comment around execution, and Lip-Bu made some comments. I am wondering how big that was in terms of the guidance cut.
Okay. Well, on Israel, we have been shut down for about two weeks. We feel like we are going to be starting up production here by the end of this week. While we are doing that, we are trying to assess all the wafers that are in the line and what is usable and what is not usable from those materials. This is somewhat of an early assessment, both really of 4Q and of 1Q. But I think the current thinking is that we will have about a $300 million impact to the fourth quarter.
That is likely to be similar in the first quarter. We think most of the write-offs of wafers or scrapping of wafers is likely to all happen in the fourth quarter. That is what is driving the 200 base. So I would not expect to see additional scrapping going on in the first quarter. But just keep in mind, it is early.
We are going through all of that as we speak, and we will of course update you as we go along. I think on the client side, obviously it is going to reset to this level, and we are going to have, I think, usually you have a very similar inventory correction quarter to quarter. So I would expect it to generally be similar other than you will have a seasonality effect in Q1 on client as well.
So the likelihood is that whatever the level that we are talking about for the fourth quarter, we will see somewhat of a seasonal decline next quarter. Beyond that, I think from an execution perspective, I have to think about some of the negative things, but a lot of the execution has been really positive. Lip-Bu and the team have done a very good job driving Intel 3 yields, driving 18A yields, and working with the substrate vendors.
Lip-Bu was in Japan talking to many of the substrate vendors to make sure that we were getting allocated the appropriate supply. So I think we are as well positioned as anyone out there in terms of delivering supply. It is tight. It is going to be tight this next quarter. It is going to be tight into the first half. But I think we positioned ourselves well so that beyond that, we should start to see some pretty healthy growth in the data center business.
Ben, do you have a quick follow-up?
Yeah. Then just with regard to the server velocity, there are shortages and whatnot, but do you have an idea for when you think you can ramp and grow in line with the market that is going on that $200 billion plus? Is that more second half next year based on your commentary? Thanks.
Yeah, good question. I think, Ben, first of all, I think the server, the biggest revenue for us is the Granite Rapids. That is on the Intel 3. Clearly, we are continuing to drive efficiency in term of yield. Secondly, we also try to expand the capacity. I think Dave mentioned about Oregon.
We are planning to have that Intel 3 in the second half of next year to be in the production so that we can supply some of the demand from the customer. I think overall, I think we will be good to address the Intel 3. Clearly, we have the Clearwater Forest, coming up, and then we are in the shipping in revenue that is on 18A. We should have capacity for that. Diamond Rapids, that will be 2027, where the 18A-P will be ready for that. Of course, the Coral Rapids coming up in 2028, that will be on the 14A. Those, I think, will be in pretty good shape.
Thanks, Ben. Jonathan, can we have the next question, please?
Certainly. Our next question comes from the line of Joseph Moore from Morgan Stanley. Your question, please.
Yeah. Along those same lines, does the PC weakness give you the opportunity to reallocate wafers and sort of address some of this and accelerate that transition?
Answer, yes. What we're taking offline to put Intel 3 into Oregon is 18A wafers, which we're generally going to build Panther Lake products. We see the opportunity with some of that capacity freed up to go produce more data center wafers. Just keep in mind that we're not only constrained on the wafer side, we're also constrained on the substrate side. So it's important we get the substrate piece of this ramped up to be able to meet the demand.
Joe, do you have a follow-up question?
Yeah, I do. How do you see server market share next year? I think you talked about 30% unit growth. AMD has guided to 70% revenue growth. The Arm camp seems to be growing quite quickly. I understand you're constrained, but how do you sort of see market share playing out?
Sure. I think that's a good question. Clearly, we have a roadmap. We like what we have. In term of Coral Rapids, we'll be competitive to AMD. Then next generation product, the Tick Tock, will be ahead of the AMD on that. I think stay tuned. We'll continue to drive leadership. CPU is really our franchise. We are determined to drive success there. I think that's a good opportunity for us to really drive that.
Yeah, I'd say maybe one other addition is I really see market share next year being a function of supply, and the more we can improve our supply on a relative basis, the better we'll do in terms of market share.
Can we have the next question, please, Jonathan?
Certainly. Our next question comes from the line of Stacy Rasgon from Bernstein Research. Your question, please.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to dig into gross margins a little bit. I get that the 38% guidance, I guess, would've been 40% without the unfortunate situation in Israel. But as I'm looking into next year, how do I think about the overall drivers? Clearly I have a client flush, and maybe utilization issue, which is a negative. I've got depreciation probably going up from CapEx, which is a negative.
Then maybe as Intel 18A and Intel 3 ramp, I get the yields are getting better, but I guess you can tell us if the gross margins on those parts are still below 10/7, and I wonder if that mix shift is a headwind, plus ASICs and packaging and everything. Maybe on the other side, though, maybe mix towards servers as a positive, maybe pricing helps. I'm just trying to get a feeling of the gross margin evolution in this kind of an environment, given all of those puts and takes, because it just seems like there's a lot of them. I'm hoping-
Yeah
You can help with that a little bit.
That's a good question, Stacy. There are definitely a lot of moving pieces. I think from a margin perspective, the Israel piece, probably on a margin basis is going to be really more of a Q4 event. I don't expect a significant amount in Q1 in terms of scrapping. Usually if we can identify it, we'll scrap it in the quarter we have.
Xeon demand remains really strong, and I think I mentioned Granite Rapids is now margin accretive for us, so growth in Granite Rapids is helpful to gross margins. We will also continue to be focused on both Intel 3 and 18A. Their structural costs is what we can focus on more is yields, throughput, all of those. We did very well in Q3. We expect to do better in Q4, and the goal is to continue to drive that through the year.
You're right, on 18A, the loading isn't going to be where we want it. We're fixing a little bit of that with putting Intel 3 in Oregon. Nevertheless, there will be a little bit of a underloading scenario for 18A that's going to be a little bit of a headwind.
The other headwind for us, which is, I think, a positive, viewed the right way, is our purpose-built silicon business, and it's kind of in its early stages. Its margins are below the corporate average. We see tremendous growth there, and Lip-Bu and I have really decided to focus on driving the gross profit. We're just going to grow the gross profit. That'll grow the earnings. It may put a little pressure on the operating margin percentage through next year, but I think it will be goodness at the bottom line.
I think when you put all that together, and it's so many puts and takes, it's hard to quantify, I'd still lean towards the 40-60 fall through. That's probably what we're shooting for. If we have a growth year next year, we should see gross margin expansion, given that kind of rule of thumb. It may not work out every quarter that way, but I think when you look at it on a year-over-year basis, it's going to be in that kind of range.
Stacy, do you have a follow-up question?
I do, yeah. I guess I wanted to ask about PCs. Q3 was probably the worst Q3 I have seen for PCs in at least 20 years, maybe more sequentially. It does sound like customers probably built inventory in Q3, I guess. Can you confirm that? Then it sounds like that they are flushing out a bunch in Q4. I kind of get and maybe even in Q1. It sounds like you think things get better in the second half as, I suppose, memory supply improves. What gives you confidence that memory supply is actually going to improve? If you listen to memory guys,
Yeah
they seem to be suggesting that it won't.
Yeah, let me be clear.
What happens if that is?
Yeah, it is a good question. Stacy, let me be clear. You are dead on that Q4, Q1 are going to be likely the two quarters in which there is most of the inventory correction, and that impacts us more than the TAM declines. So we will see that in the first, let us call it Q4, Q1, maybe stretching a little bit into Q2. After that, it does recover back to theoretically where billings to us are somewhat equivalent to consumption. So we get a little bit of a recovery from that.
But make no mistake, we are not optimistic about next year in terms of memory. We think that it is going to impact the TAM. We think TAM will be down 10% on a units basis next year. Then we will have to see in 2028 whether things improve. But our expectation is that it does not improve in 2027.
Thank you, Stacy. Jonathan, can we have the next question, please?
Certainly. Our next question comes from the line of Vivek Arya from Bank of America Securities.
Thanks for taking my question. For the first one, if I take your, I think, implied DCAI guidance for Q4, that puts it at about $8.5 billion or so. If I annualize that's mid-$30 billion in terms of a conceptual target for next year. I am curious, is that a doable floor? Can you do better? Is there kind of ASP expansion just given demand is outstripping supply, or are there other factors we should keep in mind as we think about how large your data center business could be in 2027?
Yeah. I think that's a good starting point. I think that's the right way to think about it. What we would characterize is that the first half of 2027 is likely to be tighter in terms of wafers and substrates. We've put a lot of work in place, both in terms of, as I talked about, increasing our wafer output of Intel 3, improving yields as a freeway to get more product, and the investments we've made in the substrates with vendors unlock that capacity in the back half of the year.
We do expect it to be a big growth year. Keep in mind also that we roll our purpose-built silicon, our ASICs business in under that business unit. That's part of what's driving a lot of the growth in the fourth quarter. Again, we expect that to continue in 2027.
Vivek, do you have a follow-up?
Yes. Thank you. I was hoping to get an update on engagements with external customers in your foundry, both on the packaging side and then also more importantly, Lip-Bu, on the wafer processing side. Are you expecting external customers for Intel 18A or should we assume that all the engagements will be on Intel 14A? When do you think Intel gets the confidence to move them from sort of the evaluation to the tape-out or tangible revenue column? We are all kind of set in terms of when we should start modeling external revenue for Intel over the next few years. Thank you.
Good. Vivek, thank you so much for the question. I think clearly, first question you have is about the packaging. Our EMIB making great progress. We have been very focused on capacity on the substrate, make sure that we can secure the capacity we need and also the yield profile for the capacity from substrate for material. Secondly, we focus on the yield, and we are improving substantially. Thirdly is the cycle time.
So far, under the leadership of Seok-Hee Lee, he used to be CEO of SK hynix, expert in the process integration. He has done a fabulous job, very dedicated. I think we get a lot of capacity in the next two years in term of the substrate material, and we are also improving the yield as the day go by. Overall, I think we are going to have some stay tuned.
We are going to have couple of customer ready to announce in next two quarter. Clearly, we always want to wait for the customer, if they want to announce, we will respond to that. Secondly, on the 18A-P, we are making great progress in volume production from Panther Lake and clearly on the Wildcat Lake. So I think those, internally, we have been using.
The yield, we are quite happy with the performance. Right now we also have inbound interest from the external customer, and we are intensively working with them, and they are very pleased with the yield. Right now we are focused on the die size, make sure that we can deliver to them, and also make sure that IP ready for that. So I think 18A-P, stay tuned. We have some good progress on that.
On the 14A, we make tremendous progress. I think we announced the 0.9 PDK. We already released to our select customers. They already respond very actively working with us. The other part is also, I think in term of performance, yield, all the metrics and defect density and the variation, we are making daily improvement on that.
So far, we are very pleased. We should be able to do the one PDK by Q1 next year, and we can start engaging with customer with products that they like to use our fab. So I think stay tuned. Again, we will have time to announce some of the customer when they are ready.
Thanks, Vivek. Jonathan, can we have the next question, please?
Certainly. Our next question comes from the line of Harlan Sur from JPMorgan. Your question please.
Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Commencing second half of this year, there is a number of new GPU and XPU platform launches, and most of these new launches are going to continue to ramp through the first half of next year. Given the strong CPU attached to these platforms, and many of them are Intel x86 CPU-based platforms. In addition to the overall sort of supply dynamics, which remain tight, but the team is bringing on more capacity. Yields are improving, as you mentioned. Given all of this, should we anticipate continued sequential growth in DCAI in the first quarter?
Yeah. I would avoid guiding too much the quarter. I think your overall premise is right. There is going to be a strong driver of demand for CPUs. We see that continuing all through next year. We are working on the supply side of the equation to make sure that we can meet what customers need.
We will likely not fully meet what they require, but I think we are going to be in a more challenging situation in the first half of the year than we are the second half. So maybe that is one added data point to just make sure that you are using when you are modeling. Outside of that, I would prefer to wait for another quarter and see how things play out before we guide Q1's data center.
Harlan, just to add on that, I think now clearly you saw our announcement with Oracle Cloud, and we also have multiple customer, they are all interested to sign up the LTA agreement with us, so that make sure that we can secure the CPU rollout for them. So I think those are encouraging sign that CPU is high demand.
Harlan, do you have a follow-up question?
Yeah. On the factors that the team has control over, as a reflection of the continued yield, reliability, manufacturability improvements, I think back in Q2, both Panther Lake and Granite Rapids gross margins were below corporate average. But as Intel 3 and 18A saw further yield improvements in the third quarter, you did mention Xeon 6 Granite Rapids on Intel 3 accretive to gross margins in Q3. Did the team also drive Core Series 3 Panther Lake gross margins above the low/mid 40% level in Q3 as well?
We have definitely made meaningful improvement on the gross margins of Panther Lake. It's not yet at or above the corporate average, but we have made huge strides. This is just a matter of grinding it out on yields and throughput and driving the right scale and so forth. These will be accretive gross margins over time. It's just not quite there yet.
Thanks, Harlan. Jonathan, we've got time for one last question, please.
Certainly. Our final question for today comes from the line of CJ Muse from Cantor Fitzgerald. Your question, please.
Yeah, thanks for taking the question. I guess first question, going back to the CapEx, you talked up significantly. Curious how you are thinking about spend on WFE versus buildings. I think in the past you have talked about majority of the incremental spend on buildings. Wanted to confirm that that is still the direction that we are going.
Yeah. We have, I think, a significant ramp in equipment spend this quarter, and it is expected to be even more significant next quarter. A lot of what we are spending on now is really equipment. We have made the investments. I would call it, in a lot of cases, putting the finishing touches on some of the space and most of the spend is going towards equipment, with the only exception, we are still in the heavy construction phase of Ohio. But outside of that, it is really about equipment.
CJ, do you have a quick follow-up?
Yeah, I do. On the PC side, I know you've talked about units down 10% next year for the industry. Curious if you could comment how you're thinking about your mix shift, and what impact that might have on your pricing. Thanks so much.
Mix shift in terms of low-end versus high-end and so forth? Is that what you mean?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. I would say we have seen strong demand in Panther Lake on a relative basis. Obviously the whole market is coming off, but Panther Lake is holding its own. We also put a lot of effort into a product called Wildcat Lake, which is a cost-optimized part.
We've seen significant growth in Wildcat Lake. It's coming exactly at the right time because it's cost optimized, and we're seeing a lot of focus in that regard. As we go into next year, we'll have Nova Lake, and I think the important aspect of Nova Lake is we've had a bit of a hole in our portfolio for high-end desktop, and Nova Lake filled in that gap
. So I would expect us to do pretty well on a mix basis because we should see better traction on the high-end desktop as well. So we'll see how it goes. We do feel like we go into the year as a market share gainer with our Nova Lake portfolio, and obviously we will monitor the market and see how things play out.
With that, I want to thank everyone for joining us today. We make good progress this quarter on our journey to transform Intel, but we still have a lot to work ahead of us. I looking forward to seeing many of you throughout the quarter and providing another update in January.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.