Intel CEO Says CPU Production Meets Only 50% of AI Demand

Qualcomm has unveiled two new smartphone chips built around agentic AI, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. The chips will be built into smartphones from premium Android makers, with Qualcomm's big push centered on on-device AI capabilities. Qualcomm is making this push alongside Intel, AMD and Nvidia, while Apple has been pushing on-device AI in its new laptops, and HP and Dell are also talking up the approach. The pitch is that running AI models directly on a device keeps user information private and avoids the need to sign up for a cloud provider. Qualcomm has been in this space for a while, having previously debuted PC chips for Windows laptops, and the company is now emphasizing GPU, CPU and neural processing unit cores because running AI agents on a device requires a strong CPU to avoid processing delays.

Intel Corporation can supply only about half of the processor demand its customers are asking for, chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said at Splunk's .conf26 conference in Denver this month, adding that other chief executives have called him asking for more chips and that he has had to apologize. The company has pointed to constraints across leading-edge wafers, memory and substrates, and its latest quarterly report lists industry-wide substrate and memory shortages among the risks to its supply chain. In May of this year, Tan said Intel had asked customers adopting its advanced packaging to help prepay Taiwanese and Japanese suppliers to secure capacity, with four suppliers in Taiwan and two in Japan seeking upfront commitments. Intel's second quarter revenue reached $16.1 billion, comfortably above the midpoint of its own guidance, and the stock rose 12% on September 21 in a broad rally across chip stocks. The number to watch when Intel reports in October is whether shipments actually rise, because that is the only place the unmet demand can show up as revenue.