Admit it, you didn't see this one coming?
In dire technical and financial straits for several months now, Intel first got a helping hand from the U.S. government, which approved a subsidy of nearly $9 billion. Admittedly, the Trump administration has revised its predecessor's copy by making this aid conditional on the acquisition of 10% of the group's shares, but the fact remains that this financial windfall came at just the right time for Intel. And it's not the only good news for Lip-Bu Tan, the recently appointed chairman of the American company.
Lip-Bu Tan (Intel) on the left and Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) on the right: aren't our two super-CEOs cute? Intel / NVIDIA
Indeed, this same Lip-Bu Tan has obviously got on very well with his counterpart at NVIDIA. He and Jensen Huang have just announced a colossal partnership between the two American semiconductor giants: NVIDIA is taking a stake in its competitor worth the rather remarkable sum of $5 billion. In the space of just a few months, nearly $14 billion "fell from the sky" for Intel. Naturally, the markets reacted very positively to this news, with Intel's share price rising by over 30% and NVIDIA's by 3.5% on the day of the announcement. However, one company that did not fare well was AMD, a competitor of both Intel and NVIDIA, whose share price fell by around 4% on the same day.
That said, the agreement signed by the heads of Intel and NVIDIA is still very vague, and while we know that the two companies want to work together to design SoCs with NVIDIA graphics solutions, we still don't know exactly what it will involve, especially as Intel was careful to specify that " We are not discussing specific roadmaps at this time, but this collaboration complements Intel's roadmap, and Intel will continue to offer GPU products ". So Intel and NVIDIA are going to work on Intel chips with NVIDIA iGPUs, but there's no question of invalidating Intel's GPU roadmap? Clearly, we're missing some information...
