Time:2026-10-12Reading:905Second
According to reports, Intel is making every effort to enter the ASIC custom chip foundry market, and CEO Chen Liwu's secret weapon is former Chief Sales Officer Dean Jarnac, who was just poached from Marvel.
Jarnac was appointed as Executive Vice President and Chief Sales Officer of Intel in August 2026, reporting directly to Chen Liwu. He will lead Intel's global sales organization, covering clients, data centers AI、 Network and ASIC services.
Technology analyst Jack Gold pointed out that Intel's move aims to leverage Jarnac's experience as a chip design company at Marvel to help Intel win more ASIC foundry contracts.
The popularity of the ASIC market far exceeds that of the past. The Google TPU was jointly designed by Broadcom, Marvel, and MediaTek, the Amazon Trainium chip was developed by Marvel, and the Microsoft Maia accelerator was developed in collaboration with OpenAI, Marvel, and Broadcom. OpenAI recently teamed up with Broadcom to launch the custom accelerator Jalapeno, and Anthropic has also been revealed to be collaborating with Broadcom and Samsung to develop ASICs.
Intel is not a newcomer to the ASIC market. As early as the mid-1980s, Intel had already entered this field. But after the explosion of AI inference demand, ASIC is upgrading from an "alternative solution" to a strategic choice for ultra large scale cloud vendors.
According to Intel CFO David Zinsner's financial report in July, the annualized revenue operating rate of the company's ASIC business has approached $2 billion, nearly tripling year-on-year, and is expected to reach $4 billion in the future.
The list of customers who have already landed is also expanding. In July 2026, Intel announced a strategic partnership with Fortinet to jointly develop the Fortinet security processor SP6, becoming the first publicly named foundry customer since Chen Liwu took office.
Tesla CEO Musk confirmed at the April earnings conference that the Terafab AI chip project will adopt Intel's 14A process and become the first major customer at this node. Intel has also expanded its collaboration with Google on AI chips.
Chen Liwu previously stated in an interview that custom chips are the core growth direction of Intel's foundry business, and the potential size of the AI custom silicon market exceeds $100 billion.
