Intel reports that yields are climbing by roughly 7 to 8 percent each month. That improvement, however, may be coming from a very low baseline—coverage from last summer indicated that only about 10 percent of the chips rolling off the 18A production lines met Intel’s criteria at that time. Intel says it expects output to scale up enough over the next few months to help relieve the shortages.
“I believe 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 is able to produce enough chips to satisfy demand, that should help brighten its financial results.
“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 long signaled that it is essentially selling every chip it can produce. Intel investor relations VP John Pitzer said last month that, if it had more capacity, the company would sell additional Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake Core Ultra Series 2 chips for consumers as well as more Granite Rapids chips for data centers.
While focusing on near-term supply, Intel also says it continues to advance its future process nodes, including variations of the 18A node and the forthcoming 14A node. The company is engaging with “potential external customers” who might use 14A to produce their chips. If third parties opt to use Intel’s fabs, the company expects to learn more “starting in the second half of this year and extending into the first half of 2027,” and will scale manufacturing capacity according to the number of outside customers that commit.
On the design front, Intel anticipates its first next-generation Nova Lake chips will be ready “at the end of 2026.” Details on Nova Lake remain scarce, but it is expected to be the next architecture covering both desktop and laptop processors, while Panther Lake will be aimed primarily at laptops. Parts of the Nova Lake chips will also be produced using the 18A process.
