Gelsinger’s trip will include a meeting with leaders of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, according to people familiar with his plans. Intel both needs TSMC’s advanced manufacturing services and plans to compete with the Taiwanese company in the so-called foundry business, a tricky balancing act for the CEO.
Part of Gelsinger’s answer to that is a strategy for combining parts of processors made by TSMC with other contributions from his own factories to produce more competitive computer components. At the same time he’s investing heavily to improve his own production to the point where he should no longer need TSMC’s cutting-edge production. He plans to open factories that will make semiconductors for other companies, which is the foundry business model that TSMC pioneered.
Gelsinger has said that competition and cooperation between companies is nothing new and technology is full of such arrangements. Intel has long used TSMC for manufacturing of less-important support chips for computers and other parts of its portfolio.