Chip crisis: Intel boss expects chip shortage to worsen

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Intel boss Gelsinger (archive picture): "It will be another year or two before the industry can fully meet demand."

Photo: Yuya Shino / REUTERS

The chip giant Intel expects that the global semiconductor shortage will worsen in the coming months and continue into 2023.

"While I expect that bottlenecks will bottom out in the second half of the year, it will take a year or two before the industry can fully meet the demand," said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Intel is also in the process of building up production capacity.

Part of Gelsinger's plan is to make the group more of a contract manufacturer for other chip developers.

You are in talks with around 100 potential customers, he said.

Names were not mentioned.

Takeovers to expand capacities are currently not of decisive importance for Intel, but also not ruled out, emphasized Gelsinger.

A few days ago media reports said that Intel had held talks about taking over contract manufacturer Globalfoundries for around 30 billion dollars.

However, the head of Globalfoundries, Thomas Caulfield, made it clear a little later that there would be no sale to Intel.

Gelsinger was convinced that there would be a consolidation in the industry.

Intel has a problem in its production: The introduction of more modern production processes is delayed due to setbacks in development.

At the same time, the competition is growing - not only from the smaller arch-rival AMD, but also partly from previous customers such as Apple, who develop their own chips.

Currently, Intel continues to benefit primarily from the increased demand for PCs in the corona pandemic.

In the past quarter alone, the group sold 40 percent more notebook processors than a year earlier.

With working and learning from home, the PC market, which had been ailing for a long time, received a boost that continues to this day.

At the same time, however, the data center business declined in the past quarter, as Intel announced on Thursday after the US market closed.

Consolidated sales remained virtually unchanged at $ 19.6 billion.

The profit was with a minus of 0.8 percent to 5.06 billion dollars at the previous year's level.

mic / dpa-afx