CFO Zinsner insists the troubled node was a one-off as 14A stays on track
Published Wed 03 Jun 2026 // 16:20 UTC
Intel is keen to reassure investors that its troubles with the 18A manufacturing process were a one-off, and that it is better positioned to capitalize on what it expects will be growing demand for CPUs used in AI inference workloads.
Speaking at the Bank of America 2026 Global Technology Conference in San Francisco, Chipzilla’s chief financial officer David Zinsner claimed that the firm simply bit off more than it could chew in trying to move too fast with the new process node.
“I would say it this way, I don't know, early last year, I think the challenge around 18A was two things. One, we tried to do too much at once. And it took a while to get that settled. And I think second is, we were trying to play performance and yield and trying to improve both at the same time. It was like trying to fly the plane and fix the wing at the same time, basically,” he said.
Intel 18A - its angstrom-era process, marketed as a 1.8 nm-class node - was initially expected to be production-ready by late 2024 and ramp toward volume manufacturing in 2025. However, the technology ran into delays, with the first products built on 18A not arriving until Intel unveiled its Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs back in January this year.
Zinsner said that after Pat Gelsinger's departure, when he and Michelle Johnston Holthaus took over as interim co-CEOs, he put Intel global operations chief Naga Chandrasekaran on the case, “and then they really just focused on first, stabilizing performance. And so they stabilize performance. Then once you've got your performance stabilized, then all you do is you work yield every month,” he explained.
“The second thing that we did when Lip-Bu joined is we really opened up our data to our vendors to really help us learn things that we could do to improve yield and that made a dramatic difference,” Zinsner added.
This meant overcoming some cultural resistance to sharing data, he claimed, but then “Once we fixed that, we really started to get some feedback into what we could do to improve. And then it was just our team just grinding it out every month.”
Intel’s goal is now to get to yields that generate great margins, and the firm is now ahead of its schedule to get there by the end of 2027, he claimed.
And when it comes to the next-generation 14A process, the one that Intel hopes will allow it to set up its foundry division as a contract manufacturing business as well as making its own chips, Zinsner was keen to stress that the program remains on track.
“Now I would just say we have a more aggressive plan for 14A than 18A. When you look at kind of yield and performance measures at this point in time and maturity of 14A compared to that same moment in time for 18A, we're ahead,” he claimed.
“All the stuff that I said that we bit off more than we can chew on 18A, and it really took some time. Now it's just a little bit of a rinse and repeat. I mean it will be a lot easier to do 14A because it's just using a lot of the gate-all-around and backside power and so forth that we implemented in 18A,” Zinsner explained.
As Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan explained a couple of weeks ago, the firm is now anticipating increasing demand for CPUs as the focus of the AI craze turns from training to inferencing work.
Zinsner said that it is hard to judge exactly how big the growth in CPU demand would get, but “I think it's going to be a big market.”
“If you just stamped something and called it a CPU right now, it probably would sell. So in the near term, it's all about supply,” he claimed.
“I mean we've got enough demand out there that if we can do a good job executing on the ramping of supply, we should have no issue with growing our revenue meaningfully in the datacenter space,” he added.
Zinsner also said that Intel was looking to draw up more long-term agreements with customers in the future.
“So we're locking in a price, for sure. We're locking in a volume commitment. And then that enables us to do a better job of planning out our capacity and making sure when we're investing in capacity, we're going to see customers take that supply when it comes off the line,” he said.
Intel this week unveiled its Clearwater Forest Xeon chips, along with more details of its upcoming Diamond Rapids Xeons, at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. ®
Intel bit off more than it could chew with 18A process node
CFO Zinsner insists the troubled node was a one-off as 14A stays on track
