Apparently, it has realised that having an actual working foundry is preferable to betting everything on internal production.

Chipzilla’s corporate planning and investor relations vice president, John Pitzer, spilt the beans at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The company was talking about ditching TSMC as fast as possible a year ago, but now it has decided that the Taiwanese foundry is a “great supplier.” Translation: Chipzilla can’t afford to cut ties just yet.

Currently, about 30 per cent of Chipzilla’s products are outsourced to TSMC, but the company hopes to shrink that figure.

"Not quite sure what the right sort of [outsourced production] level is," said Pitzer. "Is it 20 per cent? Is it 15 per cent? We are working through that. But we will use, I think, external foundry suppliers longer under this new strategy."

The shift to internal production is centred around Chipzilla’s next-gen Core 300-series ‘Panther Lake processors, which will be churned out in its Arizona fabs on the much-vaunted 18A process. The idea is that by doing more in-house, the company can finally boost its profit margins rather than handing TSMC a hefty cut.

However, not everything will move back to Intel Foundry. The company still needs external help for niche products and controllers that aren’t worth making on its high-end nodes. These little chips might only fetch $10–$15, but they add value to Intel’s platforms and, more importantly, require manufacturing tech that Chipzilla doesn’t have.

In the meantime, the company will keep playing the balancing act between TSMC and its fabs, hoping to figure out just how much outsourcing is too much.