Intel Bets on 18A, Xeon 6+ and AI Partnerships in COMPUTEX Comeback Pitch

Key Points

• Intel used COMPUTEX 2026 to signal a major comeback, with CEO Lip-Bu Tan emphasizing execution, engineering, and ecosystem partnerships across PCs, edge, data centers, custom silicon and AI infrastructure. He said the company is focused on four compute areas: PCs, edge/physical AI, foundational data centers and emerging “intelligence centers.”
• 18A is moving into high-volume traction, with Intel saying Core Ultra Series 3 is its first 18A-based product and already has hundreds of design wins across consumer and commercial markets. Intel also highlighted growth in handheld gaming, including the new Arc G3 GPU, which it says outperforms competitors at the same power level.
• Intel is pushing Xeon 6+ and rack-scale AI infrastructure through partnerships with Foxconn, SambaNova and Vista Equity. The company framed Xeon 6+ as a key CPU for agentic AI and data-center efficiency, while promoting open rack-scale blueprints to help customers build out AI systems without proprietary lock-in.

Intel NASDAQ: INTC used its COMPUTEX 2026 keynote to outline a broad push across PCs, edge computing, data centers, custom silicon and AI infrastructure, with Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan emphasizing execution, engineering focus and partnerships across the technology ecosystem.

Tan, who said he has been Intel CEO for 14 months, opened the event in Taiwan by highlighting the company’s long relationship with the island’s technology supply chain. He said Taiwan’s PC ecosystem “has played a critical role in Intel growth and success” and thanked suppliers, partners and customers for 40 years of partnership with Intel in Taiwan.

“At our heart, Intel is an engineering company,” Tan said, adding that execution remains “at the top” of his list. He said Intel is focused on four compute ecosystems: personal computers, edge and physical AI, foundational data centers, and emerging “intelligence centers” for digital agents.

Intel Highlights 18A, PC Design Wins and Handheld Gaming

Alex, Intel’s new leader for client compute and physical AI, said the Intel 18A process is “now at full scale” and that the company has a lineup of products with “hundreds of design wins.” He pointed to the Core Ultra Series 3, which he described as Intel’s first product built on 18A process technology, saying it targets premium mobile performance, battery life and AI-enabled experiences.

Alex said more than 300 designs are shipping across consumer and commercial segments for Core Ultra Series 3. He also said the Intel Core Series 3, introduced in April for the mainstream market, has already scaled to more than 70 designs, bringing the combined Series 3 lineup to nearly 400 designs.

Intel also highlighted handheld gaming as a fast-growing part of the PC market. Alex introduced the Arc G3, a GPU derived from Core Ultra Series 3 and tuned for handheld gaming. He said it is more than 40% faster than the competition at the same performance level, while using half the power, and that devices using it will be available later this month.

AI on Devices and Edge Expansion

Tan said AI is changing the way people use devices and identified on-device AI as a major focus area for Intel. Aravind, founder and CEO of Perplexity, joined Tan to discuss “hybrid agentic inference” using Perplexity Computer and Intel Core Ultra Series 3.

Aravind said Perplexity Computer is an AI operating system that can orchestrate multiple models, tools and files. In a demonstration involving confidential deal materials, he said local models running on Intel Core Ultra Series 3 could determine which information should remain on the device and which information could be sent to cloud-based models. He said the approach balances intelligence, accuracy, privacy and cost.

Alex also said demand for Intel processors at the edge is “booming,” with Series 3 products moving into edge markets through more than 130 designs across multiple verticals. He said Intel has more than 4,000 edge ecosystem partners in areas including manufacturing, robotics and retail. Intel also framed physical AI as a major long-term opportunity, with Alex citing a projected $25 trillion market by 2050.

Xeon 6+ and Data Center AI Infrastructure

Tan reiterated Intel’s commitment to x86, saying the architecture has powered data centers for nearly five decades. Citing IDC, he said eight out of 10 servers installed through 2030 are expected to be x86-based. He said Intel is committed to building “the best CPU cores in the world.”

Kevork, presenting Intel’s data center strategy, introduced Intel Xeon 6+ at COMPUTEX. He said the processor includes 288 E-cores, 576 megabytes of L3 cache and is built with Intel 18A technology. He said Xeon 6+ is designed to deliver efficiency and density for cloud and network infrastructure, and that ODM partners are bringing Xeon 6+ solutions to market.

Kevork said agentic AI changes infrastructure needs because CPUs are used to orchestrate tools, files, rules and other steps around AI agents. A demonstration presented by John compared traditional AI inference, which was described as GPU-heavy, with an agentic AI system using Intel Xeon 6+ efficiency cores and Xeon 6 performance cores across different pipeline stages.

Intel said a two-socket server can support 576 cores using Xeon 6+, and that a rack-scale setup can provide more than 36,000 cores in 32U of compute space. Kevork said such a rack could run up to 150,000 agents.

Rack-Scale Partnerships With Foxconn, SambaNova and Vista Equity

Tan announced an initiative called Rack-Scale Blueprints, which he said is intended to help customers scale AI infrastructure using open standards and avoid proprietary workarounds. He said Intel is working with ecosystem partners including Foxconn and SambaNova.

Jerry Hsiao, chief product officer of Foxconn, said Intel and Foxconn are working together to develop rack-scale products built on Intel Xeon processors. Hsiao said the companies will explore development, integration and commercialization of rack-scale AI infrastructure solutions for diverse AI workloads.

Rodrigo Liang, founder and CEO of SambaNova, discussed a multi-year collaboration with Intel to deliver AI inference solutions based on Xeon infrastructure. He said the SN50 SambaRack uses Intel Xeon 6 processors with SambaNova SN50 RDUs and is expected to ship to customers later this year.

Liang also demonstrated heterogeneous disaggregated inference using SambaNova RDUs, Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs. He said tests by Artificial Analysis found the disaggregated approach to be two to three times faster than GPUs alone.

Robert Smith, chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, said more than half of Vista’s more than 90 portfolio companies have converted to agentic solutions. He said Vista, with Cambium Capital, launched Vector Core Compute, or VC2, as a commercially available architecture for disaggregated inference, with more than 50 deployments planned in the U.S. targeting conversions of existing data centers to inference data centers.

Custom Silicon and Additional Partnerships

Srini, leader of Intel’s purpose-built silicon team, said Intel has entered the custom silicon market. He said Google and Intel have partnered on an infrastructure processing unit that is already designed and being deployed. He also said Ericsson has chosen Intel to deliver next-generation infrastructure silicon at global scale for telecom applications.

Tan also highlighted partnerships in biomedical engineering, life sciences, industrial technology and automation. Eddie Chang, founder and CEO of Echo Neurotechnologies, described a collaboration with Intel on brain-trained algorithms for streaming speech. Joseph Wu, co-founder of Greenstone Biosciences, said Greenstone and Intel are working to speed up medicine development by combining human biology with AI computing.

Hitachi CEO Toshiaki Tokunaga said Hitachi and Intel are bringing together Intel’s advanced computing and Hitachi’s industrial capabilities. Siemens CEO Roland Busch said Siemens and Intel are expanding their partnership across the semiconductor value chain, including design, manufacturing and chip applications in Siemens products.

Tan closed by saying Intel has had a “year of transformation,” citing the ramp of 18A to high volume, progress on advanced packaging milestones, engagement with foundry customers, new SoCs across compute platforms and strengthened ecosystem partnerships.

About Intel NASDAQ: INTC

Intel Corporation, founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is a leading global designer and manufacturer of semiconductor products. The company is historically notable for introducing the first commercial microprocessor and for driving the x86 architecture that underpins many personal computers and servers. Intel's core business spans the design, fabrication and marketing of processors, chipsets and related components for a wide range of computing applications.

Intel's product portfolio includes client and mobile processors marketed under brands such as Intel Core and Pentium, as well as high-performance Xeon processors for data centers and cloud infrastructure.

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