On Friday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal reported Intel had been approached by fellow chip giant Qualcomm about a possible takeover. While any deal is described as “far from certain,” according to the paper’s unnamed sources, it would represent a tremendous fall for a company that had been the most valuable chip company in the world, based largely on its x86 processor technology that for years had triumphed over Qualcomm’s Arm chips outside of the phone space.
It would also be a massive coup for Qualcomm, which re-entered the desktop processor market this year as a part of Microsoft’s AI PC strategy after years of dominance in mobile processors.
At the time, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the company would stop all non-essential work, and it’s since announced it will spin off its chipmaking business, a part of the company that it had long touted as a strength over its rivals AMD and the many fabless chipmakers that rely on entities like Taiwan’s TSMC to produce all of their actual silicon.
Intel, too, recently had to partially rely on TSMC to produce its most cutting-edge chips, as it continues to rebuild its own manufacturing efforts (the costs of which are responsible for most of Intel’s recent losses.)