Intel Corporation (INTC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
September 5, 2023
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Toshiya Hari
analystOkay. Great. We'd like to get started. If you could kindly take your seats, that would be appreciated. So my name is Toshiya Hari. I cover the semiconductor space at Goldman Sachs. We're very pleased, very honored to have Stu Pann from Intel with us this morning still, I think. Just a brief intro. Stu is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel Foundry services AKA IFS. In this role, he drives continued growth for IFS and its differentiated systems foundry offering, which goes beyond traditional wafer fabrication to include packaging, chiplet standards and software as well as U.S.- and EU-based capacity. Stu previously served as Chief Business Transformation Officer and General Manager of Intel's Corporate Planning Group. As part of this role, he established the company's IDM 2.0 Acceleration Office to guide the implementation of an internal foundry model. Before handing the mic over to Stu, please note that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties and may reference non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to Intel's most recent earnings release and annual report and Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC for more information on the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially and additional information on our non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations where appropriate to the corresponding GAAP financial measures. With that, Stu, over to you.
Stuart Pann
executiveThank you. Well, given the audience, I've noticed you guys probably aren't wanting to listen to a lot of slides. So I'm actually going to breeze through these things really quickly, and then we're just going to turn it over for a conversation. If you look at what's going on in our transformation, first and foremost, Intel as a manufacturing company, we're focused on process technology. You've heard my boss, Pat Gelsinger, talk any number of times about 5 nodes in 4 years. We are on track to get to 5 nodes in 4 years. And only by having process technology equivalency and then superiority do you actually make margin in this business. So we are focused on that, and I'm pleased to report we're making good progress across all of our different nodes with the stuff we're ramping today. We talked last week about Meteor Lake now in volume production for product launches at the end of the year. Granite Rapids, our server part, Intel 3 is taping out and sampling now. And we're now working on 20A and 18A designs. So I think good progress on the execution front. On my next slide, I'll talk a little bit more about what the foundry has in terms of business offering. And the third element, which I think is really important as people look at the company overall, is what role does Intel play in AI. And we play probably not as well known but I think a significant role in AI because we have AI characteristics embedded in our server processors and embedded in our mobile processors. And you'll see a lot of that play out over the coming several months as we announce more and more capability there. But I'd rather spend time on really the foundry business. And I had this little triangle, if you will, this pyramid of capability. To be successful in the foundry business, first and foremost, there are table stakes. You have to have competitive costs, you have to have competitive power, you have to have competitive scaling, and you have to have a stable process road map. Without that, you can't play in this business. We have learned a lot over the last couple of years of how to go about doing that. And 18A, which is our leading-edge node, is the first process that we've designed from the ground up to have all those table stakes. This is why we had the announcements with Synopsys a few weeks ago. It's where we're filling out all the IP necessary to make this a reality. But it's not just going to be about the IP. It's about having all the tools, flows and methods necessary to create a device, and we call this dial tone. When a customer calls up, they want to know that from start to finish, as they're working on us with designs, we can take it all the way through to production. So we're filling out all the portfolio to have dial tone, and that's big first step. But on top of that, we can add other assets to the company. We're clearly getting a lot of interest in packaging today. As you probably have heard, there's a little bit of shortage in packaging in the industry. And we have a lot of capabilities in this area because we've been in the server business for so long. So a lot of inquiries from customers around the world saying, how can you help us with more kinds of packaging capability. But then you build on even more on that. And there are things that we bring to the party in terms of systems and platform expertise. Because we're in the server business, because we're in the desktop business, because we know a fair amount of software, we're able to help our customers at a unique level because we understand what they're trying to build. So we're out trying to monetize that software and services and platform knowledge in order to create competitive advantage. And that's simply how we think about the business is table stakes, ingredients like packaging, and the capabilities to create what we call systems foundry. And that's the strategy in a nutshell, but I'll turn it over for our questions and conversation with all of you for the next 30-some-odd minutes or so.
Toshiya Hari
analystThat's great. Thank you so much for the overview. Before we dive into the business, I wanted to ask a question more about you. You started your career at Intel about 40 years ago.
Stuart Pann
executive42.
Toshiya Hari
analyst42 years ago. You left for HP in 2014.
Stuart Pann
executiveI did.
Toshiya Hari
analystAnd then you returned to Intel in 2021. What catalyzed the move to HP? What catalyzed the move back to Intel? And what was your first reaction, impression when you were asked to lead the foundry business?
Stuart Pann
executiveYes, it was interesting. I left in 2014. I was running operations for Paul Otellini from 2000 to 2013. And then Paul, as you know, retired in mid-2013. I spent a year working for Brian Krzanich. He had one vision of the company, which included things like drones and watches and clothes and things that are a little removed from our core mission, I thought. So he was the CEO. I was not. So I decided to go work for Dion Weisler and Meg Whitman at HP for 6 years as the Chief Supply Chain Officer and also as the CIO of the company, and had a great time, learned a lot. We created a lot of shareholder value with the team. But I also got a sense of how Intel's strategy has played out in the marketplace. It was fascinating to see this whole circle of life play out. I retired from HP shortly after Dion retired. Did a start-up in the middle of COVID for 3 months. That was a really bad idea, retired again, and then started doing a little bit of consulting for Intel. And then it was really Pat that brought me back and Pat's vision for the company. And so I've worked with him on rebuilding a lot of the core planning processes we had in the company that allowed us to hit tick-tock, this idea that you have process cadence and product cadence. So we worked on that for a couple of years. I think it's now starting to bear fruit as the fact that we're hitting our milestones. Our products are stable on their schedule or even pulling in a little bit. And then back in March, Pat called me up at 6:00 in the morning to ask me if I wanted to run the foundry business. My reaction was I'm really glad my wife is sleeping right now because she thought at one -- some point, I was going to retire. And I decided not to. Instead, I decided to sign up for another tour of duty and help Pat build out this capability because being in the foundry business is essential for Intel. It gives us scale, it gives us knowledge, it gives us compatibility. And I think as -- the more I get into this role I've been now doing for about 5.5 months, just the learning we have from talking to customers as foundry partners, the insights we're getting is going to make Intel a stronger company. And Pat is fond of saying, our foundry business makes our IDM business, our server and client business more competitive and vice versa. And that's absolutely turned out to be the case.
Toshiya Hari
analystThat's interesting. As the head of IFS, how do you spend your time? What are your near-term priorities, long-term goals? And how are you evaluated as the head of IFS, which obviously, in the near term, it's still a relatively small percentage of the business? It's expected to grow over time. Pat and the Board, how do they evaluate you?
Stuart Pann
executiveYes. They -- I mean, job one this year is to go land 18A customers. And for those of you in the audience who want to ask me who the prepay customer was, I'll tell you ahead of time. I'll probably disappoint you in my answer, but you can ask it if you want. But the job really is to go land serious customers that can drive significant volumes. We have landed and working closely with MediaTek on Intel 16. We have landed a compute storage partner in Intel 3. We have landed at least a prepay commitment. But we obviously would like to be able to make more definitive statements by the end of the year on this. So the bulk of my time is really working with customers and making sure we're lined up to service their needs and making sure they're comfortable with us as -- with our capabilities as a foundry supplier. I'd say about 60%, 70% is -- my time is based on that. Another 20% of my time is really based on building the organization. Do we have the right talent in place? A lot of my staff actually have come from foundry partners because we want to build that DNA inside of the organization. So we're looking at how do we recruit, how do we bring talent in, how do we make sure we've got a cohesive framework, so they feel they can contribute right out the chute. And then probably 10% of the time is spent really on some of the long-range planning stuff, but we're really focused on proving to the world we can land customers today. And boy, part of those customers include working closely with the U.S. government on the CHIPS Act funding and also working with -- helping with the EU proposals that we've made because they are our customers, right? They want to have that same level of confidence that as they're giving us taxpayer dollars, that we will be a wise steward of them and make that all pay off. So I would put governments inside of that 70% bucket.
Toshiya Hari
analystGreat. I guess in your prepared remarks, you talked about table stakes, you talked about the ingredients. But in your view, what makes a great strong foundry supplier? Which aspects do you possess today? And which aspects do you still need to work on?
Stuart Pann
executiveWell, I think in terms of what we have to -- coming out of the chute, a lot of people don't realize this. But I have to -- and I spent time pointing it out is we have a really good IDM business. Our Q2 guidance was $12.9 billion to $13.9 billion. Pat last week guided to the higher end of that range. But because we have the assets of a strong internal business, we have 40,000 people in manufacturing, 15,000 people in R&D, and we can leverage off of that base. The challenge for us is how do we take that base that's been internally focused and make it externally focused. And I think as we show the world that we have process capability like we do in 18A, in 20A and Intel 7, 4 and 3, as we show the world we can deliver to demanding packaging requirements, which they're all coming at us for, I think those are things we can build out. But we have a lot to work from. We're doing -- in terms of Moore's Law, Pat is fond of saying that Moore's Law will be exhausted in the last element of the periodic table, so we have a ways to go there. But clearly, for the next 10 years, we can keep knocking out process improvements year after year. So that's our base, that's our heritage. Now the question is how do we take that heritage and make it available for all foundry customers and not just the Intel internal business units. And I think we're making headway to that. To that end, I think some of you may have heard about the fact that we're doing an internal operating model for the foundry business and for our business units. And that's one of the key points that we're working on really hard is how do you separate manufacturing and foundry from our product groups. We're creating a structure that involves arm's length transactions between manufacturing and the Intel internal business units so they can buy at a wafer cost TSMC-like, so they can get defect densities at a TSMC-like defect density. And it's incumbent on the organization that does manufacturing to hit those targets. So now our business units can plan their business the same way AMD plans their business or TSMC or Qualcomm does. And then we're very focused on hitting our cost targets because we know what it's going to take to win our internal business and what it will take to win external business. And this is why Dave Zinsner in that call remarked that we're headed toward a goal of $8 billion to $10 billion of savings by -- in exiting '25 because we're so focused now on the right things. And that's just one example of the things that we will build out to make us a more credible foundry supplier.
Toshiya Hari
analystGot it. That's very helpful. And then I guess, in terms of customer engagements, cases where you manage to land customers, what did they see in IFS? To the extent there have been instances where things didn't play out the way you hoped them to, what were some of the reasons for the lack thereof?
Stuart Pann
executiveWell, when we looked at the -- the announced customer, we have MediaTek, as an example. They saw in us a really hungry, aggressive partner that was willing to do what it took to win their business. Cost, quality, performance, guarantees, collaboration, we put our best foot forward to go win MediaTek. And we learned a lot in that engagement process, similar to the Intel 3 customer that we won that has asked at this point in time to remain unannounced. Where it hasn't worked out is people are just -- they're waiting to see what happens, right? They want to believe that 18A is going to be there. And so what we're doing right now is they're saying, okay, I want to see a few more test chips or I want to see a more evolved PDK process design kit specification. I can tell you, all of them are interested in having Intel win. They're all interested in resilient supply chains. They're all interested in a U.S.-based supply chain. They're all interested in having choice. But they won't risk their business until we can meet the fundamental table stakes of the business, which is competitive power performance, area and cost. Once we have that, once we demonstrate to all of them, as we've demonstrated, for example, the one customer that we've got a prepay from last week, they gain confidence. But they're always going to be a little bit more risk-averse, so they want to see a little more silicon progress. One of our customers has a phrase I often use called silicon speaks. And the foundry business, it's an incredibly measurable business. So having silicon, having them see the constant improvement in performance, builds confidence such that they want to look at us as an alternative supplier to TSMC, which does a very good job for them. So we know what we have to go do, we're knocking it out right now, and I believe that we will win these customers as the months progress here.
Toshiya Hari
analystConflict of interest is something that comes up in conversations with investors as it pertains to the foundry business. TSMC, sure. Foundry, nothing more, nothing less, right? You guys obviously have a strong product group. Samsung has suffered from this issue as well. How do you address that? You talked about separating manufacturing with the product group but still under Intel.
Stuart Pann
executiveWell, I think the way I look at it is you imagine that I'm in front of Lisa Su or Cristiano Amon or Jensen Huang, many of the people that you all know, right? How can I convince them that we're serious? And the only way to convince them is you have to take concrete actions. For example, our sales forces are separate. We have 2 separate instances of SAP, we have firewalls, we have personal NDAs that our salespeople sign that there are consequences if they violate those NDAs. So we're super religious about protecting their IP. Pat runs 2 separate staff meetings. I do not attend the business unit staff meetings anymore or the manufacturing people. There are a few that we do combine like overall HR issues, but we run the business separate. We're creating 2 separate SAP instances to create these arm's length transactions, so nobody gets access to anybody else's data. And I think they have to watch our actions rather than our words to see that this is happening. We know if we ever violate a customer's confidence, we're done in this business. Absolutely done. So we are religious about maintaining IP. By the way, we do a lot of work with the governments around the world, especially governments who don't like their names being used publicly. And we're going to protect our information to those level of standards, right? That's how we have to think about it. And given the amount of energy we're putting into this and the investment we're making into these areas, I believe we'll pull it off. But we all know that there are -- there can be zero tolerance and zero mistakes in this. And we will do everything we can to firewall what we learn from our customers and make sure it stays separate from the IDM business. I think one way you could look at that just as an existence proof, this morning, we announced that we're an investor in ARM. So if you want to know that we're serious about embracing that world, which by the way, 80% of TSMC's wafers have an ARM processor in them. The fact that our organization, the IFS organization, is embracing ARM at this level, investing in ARM, doing partnerships with ARM, should give you a signpost that we're absolutely serious about playing in this business because if you're not working with ARM, you can't be a foundry's provider. So yes, just a couple of proof points as to how we do this.
Toshiya Hari
analystYes. So on that point, the partnerships that you've announced over the past, call it, 6 to 12 months, whether it be Cadence, whether it be Synopsys, RISC-V, ARM, in terms of kind of building out that ecosystem, having table stakes to compete in the foundry universe, are you sort of at a steady state, if you will? Are you done kind of signing these partnerships? Or is there more to do?
Stuart Pann
executiveOh, no. There's a lot more to do. I mean there's a lot more to do with the existing partners. For example, we announced something with ARM. We will do more with them, clearly, as they expand their base. They have multiple interests in multiple areas, and they have been a superb partner. They're teaching us how to do, for example, low-power silicon because they have 99% of the phone market. We're working closely with them in other areas of their business. Cadence, we're working closely with. We'll work to have some announcements from them over the course of the coming months. Synopsys, we just had this big announcement a few weeks ago where they're filling out their IP portfolio. But it's also how do we go to market with them, how can we support each other because they view us as a new opportunity. There are a lot of third-party IP providers, folks like [ Apple Wave ] that we have an investment in today, right? We do some really incredible things with SerDes. So there's a lot more work to build out this ecosystem. And I think we're really just getting started. Our focus will be for now much more on ARM than around RISC-V because that's where the volume is at, but expect more to come out in the coming months.
Toshiya Hari
analystOkay. Great. I have got a bunch more questions, but maybe I'll pause here and see if anyone has any questions in the audience.
Stuart Pann
executiveThis is not a shy crowd, usually.
Toshiya Hari
analystI can keep going. Maybe on the long-term opportunity set for the foundry business. It's been a while since -- and I think this may predate you or you were part of the company when you hosted the Investor Day, but you were not...
Stuart Pann
executiveI was part of the company when the IBM PC came out, but that...
Toshiya Hari
analystRight. In '22, I think the most recent Investor Day was hosted. Pat and Dave shared a 2026 TAM estimate of $160 billion for IFS, which implied a growth rate in the high single digits. Now that you're leading the business, does that still sound like the right context and format?
Stuart Pann
executiveIt can, but I think the real issue is -- you have to look at it customer by customer, and there are a lot of people who put out TAM projections. And the industry talks about $1 trillion of semiconductor business in 2030. I come from a sales background. I was in sales for half of my -- less than half my career at Intel, about 40% of it, where I just looked at customers and can we win business. So we're very focused on who buys this stuff, what are the opportunities. And the forecast I have to build is more of a bottoms-up strategy. We still have to get to this goal of how do we become the #2 external foundry supplier by 2030. But I start with who are the customers and what do they buy and where do we have the probability of winning. So you asked me a question earlier about how does the Board evaluate me. The Board is looking at the details, right? They don't want sweeping -- this is the TAM. They want to know who are your top 5 customers, how are you going to grow them, when can I see some announcements. And that's how they're measuring me and my organization is are we bringing real meat to this conversation. So while I do care about long-term TAM forecast, I think because of the size of the way these large customers buy, one deal is really big. So you just have to really focus on the deals that are out there and closing them. And that's really what we're focused on more than the TAM forecast.
Toshiya Hari
analystOkay. And again, in terms of the opportunity set, whether it be device type, whether it be end market, is there a focus inside of IFS? Or are you kind of looking pretty broad?
Stuart Pann
executiveWe want to look broad. But our heritage has always been one of high-performance transistors. You look at our business, our server business, our client business has always been more about performance and less about being power-constrained. As a result, we have, I think, still a lot to learn in how to do great mobile designs. And some of the work we've done with Qualcomm as part of RAMP-C, some of the work we're doing with ARM, for example, right now in terms of their mobile platform, we're learning more and more how to do a great mobile process. But our heritage is really high-performance silicon. So you'll see us gravitate more toward more of the high-performance activities and then also taking advantage of the packaging that supports that kind of technology characteristics. So very large die sizes, doing things like EMIB, which are ways to connect dies on a single substrate, doing things beyond that going forward, offering our customers a 5-year packaging road map. That's where we, I think, have a lot of natural fellow travelers. And then we're going to build out our mobile process capability as we go along with learning we're getting from like MediaTek right now. So that's sort of a bias, if you will, to how we're thinking about it.
Toshiya Hari
analystAnd Stu, you just talked about your packaging capabilities. Obviously, there's a shortage as we speak in advanced packaging, if you will, around [ colos ]. Have you seen sort of an uptick in customer engagements as it pertains to your packaging technology? I think Amazon was one of your first customers.
Stuart Pann
executiveThey were the first one. Amazon and Cisco, both. We've seen a dramatic uptick. And I think one of the things -- unfortunately, we don't have a camera here. Otherwise, you guys can all see this on the screen. But I have sitting here in my hand a single device on a single package. It's 100 billion transistors, it's 47 different tiles, 47 different active tiles, all on one common substrate on the back here. It mixes and matches Samsung HBM memory. It has TSMC-based technology and compute technology. It has some of our compute technology on it. And this is the heart and soul of the Argonne supercomputer over at the Argonne National Laboratories. You take 60,000 of these, another 20,000 Sapphires, and you have a machine that can do 2 exaFLOPs a second of compute performance. So that's 2 billion, billion floating point operations a second. This installation goes live this fall. We believe it will be the fastest supercomputer on the planet. And the reason I bring this up in the context of packaging is this is sort of the acid test. If you can take 47 active tiles, mix and match this across different suppliers, have world-class back-end assembly test yields, so you're not throwing stuff out. This is why people are interested in talking to us about packaging technology because we've done some of the hardest packaging things in the world and made them reality. So dramatic uptick. I hope to soon announce what some of those customers are. But for now, they're going through all their evaluations. But we're doing a number of projects right now with a number of favorite names that you all know. We'll see how it turns out.
Toshiya Hari
analystGot it. And then from a wafer processing standpoint, I had a question on how to think about your capacity expansion plans. We just discussed how you're building a wall between the Intel product group and IFS. I think some customers oftentimes want to see capacity first before they sign up, but you want to be prudent with your CapEx. So how should we think about your capacity plans from a foundry perspective? Like what percentage of your total capacity today is purely dedicated for the foundry business?
Stuart Pann
executiveYes. I mean today, we're obviously a super small wafer fab capacity. And I'm not going to a disclosure by year of what this looks like. What we are doing is, for any foundry deal, you have to commit capacity corridors. In fact, the phrase is corridor. So once you commit that corridor, that corridor is [ inviolate ] to the customer it's giving to. So as we're working to strike deals like, for example, like the prepay thing we just did, what's involved in that is how do we set up a capacity corridor for them or for any other customers. Once that's done, it's theirs. And the IDM business, our server client business, can't mess with it. Now we have to be really judicious about this. How do we forecast the size of the IDM business and the size of the foundry business? So we created a fairly elaborate set of models where we look at what gets a corridor and what gets constrained to our internal business. And because we've been modeling PC business and server business for a long time, we have a pretty good handle on what that is, plus/minus. It's a fairly narrow band. The foundry deals will add capacity as we get customers in place. And part of our conversation with them is getting sure we know the timing of that. We will then sequence our construction spending based on commitments from these customers and based on how well the client business and server business is doing. Take all that, model it together, that gives you the construction schedule for Arizona. It gives you the construction schedule for Ohio. It gives you the construction schedule for Germany, Ireland and Israel, all 5 of those facilities. And then the other way we think about capacity is the Tower announcement we just did this morning, where we have capacity in an older factory. We have tools for older technologies. We found a way to do contract manufacturing for them to take advantage of that extra space, those older tools that we weren't using, taking some investment from Tower to finish out the line. And now we're a contract manufacturer. And so -- by the way, being part of that business also teaches us more about how to be a better foundry supplier. So we never stopped talking to Tower even after we didn't exactly get the approval we wanted. And we found a way to do business with them. I think that's going to be very successful for both of us.
Toshiya Hari
analystSo this Tower announcement from this morning, so you're supporting them in 12-inch, is that correct?
Stuart Pann
executiveCorrect, yes.
Toshiya Hari
analystAnd then 8-inch...
Stuart Pann
executiveThey have their own silicon...
Toshiya Hari
analystThey do. And you would produce overflow or...
Stuart Pann
executiveNo. We've contracted with them for a very specific 12-inch flow for 65 nanometers that is in high demand by their end customers. Tower does some magical things with RF and power. Power is super important for a whole bunch of applications. They are world class in what they do. They wanted a U.S. factory. They wanted capacity expansion. We had to find a way to make it -- have economic sense for both of us. And because we have a building there, we have tools already there. We can bring more tools as we need, and they add a few things of their own in this. Out pops a good 65-nanometer BCD processor is how they coin it for them to go use with their customers.
Toshiya Hari
analystGot it. Okay. All right. That's helpful. We talked about the internal foundry model extensively. I think starting in Q1 of next year, you guys will report the manufacturing arm of the company, if you will, and the product group arm P&L margins, et cetera. I guess my blunt question is, well, what is that going to look like? The manufacturing arm, it is subscale at this point from an external-facing standpoint. But the P&L will be for both external-facing and internal-facing. Is that the right way to think about it?
Stuart Pann
executiveYes. The -- you think about it this way, we will sell wafers to the internal business units. They will have a wafer price, and we will recognize that price along with our costs in that P&L. And we'll also sell wafers externally. So the TMGF P&L will be a combination of both internal and external. As to subscale, we're driving -- still driving a lot of volume. It's not like -- it's a small operation, but we will make sure those wafer prices that we're charging the business units are competitive with what they can see from an external supplier. So you'll see that all play out. And we're going to take some aggressive goals in terms of margin targets. I'm not ready to disclose what all those look like today. I'll leave that to Dave Zinsner and Pat. But we have a pretty well-thought-out plan right now. And we're already starting to look at the business in terms of how they make decisions both with an IAO format and with a classic Intel-integrated format. We still run the company today on the classic integrated format, but the IAO view is starting to inform how we think about things in the future.
Toshiya Hari
analystGot it. And I guess in the spirit of this true internal foundry model, your product teams, are they free to like leave Intel and go to TSM or Samsung? Are they still encouraged to stay with Intel? Like how is that going to work? Like how disciplined are you truly?
Stuart Pann
executiveI mean there are some rather Grovian conversations that we're now having. Andy was famous for having very blunt conversations, and those conversations are now happening. I think being part of an Intel business unit means you have all your capacity guaranteed, for all intents and purposes. So we're not going to see a whole -- they won't be able to wholesale flock and give all their business to a foundry competitor nor do they have to because we're fairly competitive. But we do want them to have choice. And we have a very strong business with TSMC. We have a very complicated business with them, but a strong business partnership with them. And I am perfectly fine for our business units who want to keep testing us to see how we're doing because if we can't win their business, we can't win business externally. So I think it's important for us to constantly market test, internally and externally, to make sure we're doing the best job possible. And yes, to some extent, the BUs will have freedom of choice. And it's incumbent on the factory team, the manufacturing organizations, the R&D organizations to do the most competitive process they can do to keep our internal business units whole because if we don't do that, our internal business units, the server business, the client business, won't thrive, right? We make the kind of margins that our investors are used to making when we have process superiority. That's how this business has always worked. If you look in the past, we were always returning 50% to 60% gross margins, but we were continually a process generation ahead. We have the roadmaps in place to do that with gate-all-around, with backside metallization. And as we realize and ramp those processes, we believe we're going to be able to give our business units more competitive advantage, and that will show up in their willingness to give the manufacturing team more of their wafers. So that's how it works, but it will be a good, healthy debate and conversation.
Toshiya Hari
analystAnd I guess as you make this transition, do you lose any of the positives from an IDM business model perspective? One team, one dream, design team, manufacturing team? That used to be the old sort of statement, if you will, from Intel, right?
Stuart Pann
executiveI think the dream itself is being recast into that -- we all have positions to play on this battle on this field of play. Manufacturing guys have to have world-class costs. Business units have to have world-class architectures. And I think we're playing more effectively as a team by doing this. Now we're having a few more arguments here and there, but it's bringing back healthy debate and choice and focus. And that's what we need to be to be successful. It goes back to Pat's saying, the foundry business will make our internal business more successful and vice versa. And that continuous loop and knocking out 5 nodes in 4 years and working in getting a resilient supply chain, all those things benefit all of our customers, whether it be our business units or our foundry customers. So yes, I like our chances. I like the progress we're making. And hopefully, we're showing you enough in terms of signposts, whether it be the IP announcements we're making, the partnerships we're striking, the prepays that we're getting to show that there is progress being made and that our team hopes to keep bringing you more news like this going forward.
Toshiya Hari
analystGot it. In the last 60 seconds or so that we have, anything about the foundry business, anything about Intel broadly that you want to highlight? Or anything that we -- I know you don't spend too much time with investors. But anything that we collectively missed about the Intel story?
Stuart Pann
executiveWell, I'm going to be spending a lot more time with investors as evidenced by today. No, I think the thing -- I'll speak of this as -- part of the reason I came back, and this is -- I'll end with a personal note. I think Intel is hugely important to American manufacturing. I believe governments around the world view that. Certainly, the U.S. government views that. And I think it's critical that we remain successful because losing Intel would be, I think, losing the crown jewels of American manufacturing. And that's the thing that -- if people ask what drives Pat and myself, the leadership team, to want to come in day in and day out and drive this, it's preserving that capability for this country that I think is the mission that we've all taken on. And I believe the foundry business will go a long way in helping us get there.
Toshiya Hari
analystGreat. That's a good place to end. Thank you so much.
Stuart Pann
executiveThanks, everyone.
Toshiya Hari
analystAppreciate the time.
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