intel 18a

Demand for Intel’s processors is apparently there, but the supply is not

18a, core ultra series 3, intel, intel 18a, panther lake, Tech / Mike M. / January 23, 2026

Yields are currently improving by 7 or 8 percent every month, according to Intel. But that could be building on pretty low initial yields—reporting from last summer suggested that just 10 percent of the chips coming off of the 18A production lines were meeting Intel’s requirements at the time. Intel predicts that its supply will have ramped up enough within the next few months to help alleviate shortages.

“I do believe that the first quarter is the trough,” said Zinsner. “We will improve supply in the second quarter.”

Intel is selling everything it can make

When Intel can start making enough chips to meet its demand, it ought to help brighten the company’s earnings reports.

“We delivered [our Q4 2025] results despite supply constraints, which meaningfully limited our ability to capture all of the strengths in our underwriting markets,” said Tan. “We are working aggressively to address this and better support our customers’ needs going forward.”

Intel has been signaling for a while now that it was selling essentially all of the chips it could get its hands on. Intel investor relations VP John Pitzer said last month that Intel would be selling more of both its Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake Core Ultra Series 2 chips for consumers, as well as its Granite Rapids chips for data centers, if it could get more of them.

As Intel seeks to improve its position in the short term, the company also says that it’s still making progress on its future manufacturing nodes, including different versions of the 18A process and the upcoming 14A process. Intel is working to engage “potential external customers” who would use the 14A process to make their own chips. If these third parties decide to use Intel’s manufacturing facilities, Intel expects to know about it “starting in the second half of this year and extending into the first half of 2027,” and then it expects to build out manufacturing capacity based on the number of external customers it finds.

On the chip design side, Intel also expects to have its first next-generation Nova Lake chips ready “at the end of 2026.” We don’t know much about Nova Lake yet, but it should be Intel’s next architecture to cover both desktop and laptop processors, while Panther Lake chips are intended mainly for laptops. At least part of the chip will also be manufactured using the 18A process.

Demand for Intel’s processors is apparently there, but the supply is not Read More »

Report: Intel struggles with new 18A process as it cuts workers and cancels projects

Intel has a lot riding on “18A,” its next-generation manufacturing process for silicon chips that the company claims will help it catch up to the lead that competitors like TSMC have built up over the last few years. With 18A, Intel would return to manufacturing its own processor designs in its own factories, including the upcoming Series 3 Core Ultra chips for laptops (codenamed Panther Lake), after manufacturing parts of all other Core Ultra chips with TSMC. Intel is also offering 18A manufacturing capacity to external chipmakers, a major milestone in former CEO Pat Gelsinger’s plan to make Intel a competitive cutting-edge (and primarily US-based) chip manufacturer for the rest of the industry.

But a Reuters report claims that Intel is struggling to make usable chips on 18A, according to “people who were briefed on the company’s test data since late last year.” As of this summer, these sources say that just 10 percent of the chips being manufactured on 18A are “up to [Intel’s] specifications.”

Intel disputed the numbers cited in the report. “Yields are better than that,” Intel CFO David Zinsner told Reuters, though neither Zinsner nor Intel provided an alternate figure.

Whether Intel is struggling with 18A or not, the story is easy to believe because it fits a decade-long pattern going back to early delays for Intel’s 14 nm process in 2013 and 2014. Intel had finally switched its lineup to the 14 nm process by late 2015, but it was then stuck on that manufacturing process for years (2019–2020 for laptop chips, 2021–2022 for desktop chips).

Through that span, Intel’s PR strategy was familiar: insist that things were ramping up well internally and that bugs were being ironed out, express confidence in the roadmap, give itself a little wiggle room on launch dates of actual products, and continue onward.

In this case, Intel told Reuters that its Panther Lake chips are “fully on track” as of July 30. Intel reaffirmed that it would launch Panther Lake using the 18A manufacturing process in the second half of 2025, with more models coming in 2026. These will be the milestones to watch for—Intel could very well be struggling to ramp up yields on 18A chips, but the struggles could be normal-ish and planned-for ones that don’t delay the company’s plans any more than they already have.