Intel Xeon 6 processors unveiled to CNBC on November 17, 2025 at Intel’s advanced packaging facility in Shambler, AL.
tony puyol
google We are committed to using it for multiple generations. intel The company’s artificial intelligence data center central processing unit is an expansion of an existing partnership.
Intel stock rose 2% on Thursday, while Alphabet stock fell more than 1%.
The Internet giant has long relied on Intel processors, dating back to its early server rack concepts nearly 30 years ago. Intel’s latest Xeon 6 CPUs will now run AI training and inference workloads, potentially giving the chipmaker a strong position in the AI market that has so far been dominated by Intel. Nvidia.
“Their Xeon roadmap gives us confidence that we can continue to meet the performance and efficiency demands of growing workloads,” Amin Vahadat, chief technologist for AI infrastructure at Google, said in a statement Thursday.
Financial terms were not disclosed, and the companies have not disclosed a timeline for the deal.
The deal comes as CPUs take center stage in the next phase of the AI race. Dion Harris Nvidia‘s head of AI infrastructure told CNBC in March that the CPU is “becoming the bottleneck” as agent workloads increase computing needs beyond the graphics processing units that have traditionally dominated AI.
“Scaling AI requires a balanced system, not just accelerators,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a statement about the deal with Google on Thursday.
Intel, which has struggled for years to keep up with new trends in technology, sold a 10% stake to the U.S. government in August as the Trump administration touted the chipmaker’s ability to manufacture advanced chips in the United States. The following month, Nvidia announced it would buy a stake in Intel for $5 billion.
Buoyed by these investments, Intel’s stock price has nearly tripled over the past year.
Intel is manufacturing its latest Xeon processors based on cutting-edge 18A technology at a chip manufacturing facility in Arizona that opened last year. Despite pouring billions of dollars into the foundry’s business, Intel’s own processors remain the new factory’s biggest customer.
However, Tan wrote on LinkedIn earlier this week that Elon Musk is using Intel to support SpaceX, xAI, and tesla No financial details or timelines were announced for his ambitious Terafab project in Texas.
As part of Thursday’s announcement, Google and Intel reiterated that they are collaborating on another type of chip, the infrastructure processing unit (IPU), which the two companies have been working on jointly since 2022. Intel said in a press release that the programmable accelerator is used to “offload networking, storage, and security functions from the host CPU.”
Google told CNBC in an email that the IPU was the first chip of its kind when the two companies first developed it together four years ago. Google says it’s designed to help customers more efficiently utilize the main CPUs in traditional data centers by taking over “overhead” tasks such as routing network traffic, managing storage, encrypting data, and running virtualization software.
For more than a decade, Google has also developed its own custom AI accelerators called tensor processor units (TPUs). In 2024, Google also began manufacturing its own custom CPU, Axion, opting for an Arm-based design over Intel’s dominant x86 architecture.
—CNBC’s Kristina Partinevelos contributed to this report.
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