LIVE: COMPUTEX 2026: Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan Reveals Major Strategy for AI and Semiconductors | AI1B

Silicon, the foundation of modern technology. Every transistor placed with purpose. Every watt wrestled from physics. Where every instruction set earns its right to execute. This is how performance gets driven. How efficiency gets built. How intelligence acts, not just answers. Our future is with ecosystems shaped by architecture capable of connecting technologies, tools, and partners. Powerful enough to execute, efficient enough to scale, familiar enough to build with speed. Tomorrow, it's about the progress we scale through open platforms, shared standards and partnerships, amplifying each other's strengths. A unified architecture engineered for systems. The next chapter is being written in silicon with our engineering at its heart. Built different, built together, built on Intel.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to the CEO of Intel, Lip-bu Tan.

Thank you, Lip-bu. Little story about me. The first time I came to Taiwan was the year 1990, and I was fresh out of school. First job, first international trip, first East Asia country I've ever been to. And I came right here in Taipei. And I quickly realized even back then that, you know, the desire to grow, the mindset of win-win and cooperation is all over all of our customers and our partners here in Taiwan. And so it quickly became one of my favorite countries to visit and work. And now, forward the clock 36 years, I'm here in my first international trip with all the great people here at Intel. And where do I come? Right here to Taipei. Thank you. I can't wait to plan and build a future with you guys. So let's get started. We have a lot to cover. Intel has continuously increased the pace of progress across all PC segments: workstations, desktops, creators, gamers, premium and mainstream laptops. Every major segment is driven by an Intel system solution. With that vast coverage in mind, we're adding another dimension to scale these products even more effectively. The Intel 18A process is now at full scale. We have a full lineup of products with hundreds of design wins to prove that. At CES, we launched the Core Ultra Series 3, Intel's first product built on 18A process technology. It's setting a new standard for premium mobile performance and battery life. The Ultra Series 3 enables great user experiences across any tasks with a very fast response CPU, a highly improved GPU, low power processing NPU, and the latest multimedia capabilities. It's a perfect blend of IP performance and power for any AI and agentic experience. It's allowing us to lead the way to transform every PC to an agentic capable platform. Today, more than 300 designs are shipping across consumer and commercial segments, over 300. And to scale these capabilities even further, we've taken the latest Core Ultra IPs and specifically tailored them for the mainstream market. The result, the Intel Core Series 3 introduced in April. Let me repeat, we just introduced this in April and it's already scaled up to 70 plus designs. That brings the total series lineup to nearly 400 designs in just a few short months. Now, that is massive scale. Let's look at some of the capabilities of the Core Series 3. And we can start with battery life. You know, I can go over these numbers here that are printed and I can talk about how we measure them and things like that, but I have a question for you guys. How long is your day? 10 hours, 12 hours, 14 hours, or more like us at Intel? But the great user experience is if your PC lasts longer than your workday. And that's exactly what we're delivering in all segments. And we support ample number of ports for all of your connectivity needs, unlike some of our competitors who only have one USB-C interface. But I'll let you be the judge of that one. The goal of this Core Series 3 is to bring premium feel and experiences to incredibly thin form factors for mainstream PCs. And you know, you don't have to take my word for it. You can look at this wall of incredibly designed, sleek PCs that are here, and all of it is thanks to you, our partners, and our customers. We couldn't have done it without you. So, please, a round of applause. Isn't it awesome? Super light, super thin, really great. Okay. Now, the next proof is scaling 18A IP into growing markets. And the fastest growing portion of the PC market is the handheld gaming. Let's take a look. This is the ARC G3. I think a beautiful chip, more beautiful than what was presented yesterday at a keynote. The G3 is derived from the Core Ultra Series 3 and the ARC G3 is a tuned high-performance GPU specifically for handheld gaming and it's providing great battery life. The performance tested across multiple games is consistent and stable versus competition. We are more than 40% faster, 40% faster, and at the same performance, we're half the power. And on top of that, we're running all AAA games at 1080p resolution, many of them above 120 frames per second. Now, that is giving gamers a great user experience. All of these devices will be available later this month, and this is just the beginning. We're going to have plenty more designs coming throughout the year. Okay, it is indeed true that Intel has a leading lineup of processors and with the versatility of the 18A process technology, our newest offerings, we're bringing powerful performance and efficiency to scale across the breadth of premium, mainstream, and handheld gaming segments. These same fundamentals, the same IP, the same capabilities can deliver far beyond the PC ecosystem. The demand for our processors at the edge has been booming. As you've seen, we've already taken existing product lines and pivoted them into adjacent markets, enabling our customers to grow their businesses. Now, the edge is demanding the latest products from Intel. And that's why this year, we're taking our latest Series 3 products into the edge business with over 130 designs in multiple verticals. For large-scale edge business, our customers need the best technology and chipsets, easy to use reference designs, and appropriate software stacks. And at Intel, we've done all of that. We have over 4,000 edge ecosystem partners deploying into such verticals such as manufacturing, robotics, retail, and many more. For those of you here at Computex, you can see some of that at the pavilion. Given that capability, given the IP, given the chipsets, given the scale that we have, there's a massive opportunity ahead of us across many segments of physical AI. It's projected to be a 25 trillion market by 2050, and it will leverage all of our scale in the PC ecosystem. Physical AI form factors will take shape across key industries, as you see behind me. We will continue growing these markets with the same strategy of leading IP and chipsets, complete reference platforms of end-user hardware and applicable software stacks enabling our customers to expand into new physical AI form factors and applications. And indeed, this will be our future. Now back to you, Lip-bu. Thank you.

Yeah. So in February we launched Perplexity Computer. Computer is an AI operating system. It creates a team of agents, uses up to 20 different AI models, and it orchestrates across models, tools, and files in one single system. The agent harness inside Computer is model agnostic, perfectly balancing intelligence, accuracy, privacy, and cost is the orchestration problem it solves. And so this allows you to run smaller models locally on the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 GPU. And so for the first time ever, we worked together to create hybrid agentic inference. And so what we are showing today is just the start. Hybrid agentic inference is how we maximize token value per watt per user.

Yep. All right. So here it is. Let's say I'm an associate at a private equity firm and I'm working on something that has a confidential project code name Project Falcon. Here's the query. So, think of it as me trying to understand if a certain private company is worth $1.1 billion and I'm feeding it confidential deal materials. The work begins on the laptop. It sees that Project Falcon has private deal room files and an NDA, a local leveraged buyout financial model, a whiteboard diagram and bilingual transcripts that are very confidential. You don't want these materials to be shipped to the server. So what the local model does on the Core Ultra Series 3 is it first decides this is all very important work and shouldn't be sent to the server. It reads the files, classifies what is sensitive and what is not, and then Computer decides what should leave the device and what shouldn't, and each of these things is done with local AI. The orchestrator can spin up additional agents as necessary. And so if you need a research agent to bring in outside file materials against local model without exposing any private files, that's what you want in the hybrid system. And so Computer acts as one single system, brings all inputs and outputs together. And so let's actually skip and see what the actual result would be. All right. So the result is a document, a research report and supporting data. And it's been created by agents on large cloud-based models keeping your sensitive information only on your device. And so all your local device models will take care of the private files and the server side models will take care of other things through hybrid inference orchestration. This is the architecture we both believe in and the future is more compute in the data center and more compute on the local machine. And so I think of this as a big milestone for engineering on both the agent harness AI side as well as the chip side. And so it's been really fun to partner with you and Intel on this. So thank you so much, Lip-bu.

Thank you, Lip-bu. Wow. It's so great to be here, specifically in this point in our history, global history, collective history, and be at Computex with the blue badge. So I'm very happy, I'm very humbled to be here to share with you some of the innovations that we have. So let's talk a bit about what this AI thing is about. So when we say foundational, we mean the workloads that keep the world running. So currently we have data centers and there's a number of items and workloads and entities that run on these data centers. So for example, we have 5G networks that keep us connected. We have databases that keep our data safe. We have cloud services that power our daily lives. So we expect demand for these workloads to grow in size and capacity between now and 2030 from 80 gigawatt to about 100 gigawatt. And yeah, most of you involved in this domain understand the extent of this type of an expansion. These workloads are broad. They are mission critical. So special attention has to be taken when running them. But also they require performance, efficiency, security, and resiliency. And we can't emphasize enough all these four factors. That is why we are excited to have Intel Xeon 6 Plus introduced at Computex this week. It has 288 E-cores, a massive 576 megabyte of L3 cache, built with our Intel 18A technology. And we can't emphasize enough the value of Intel technology that brings to data center products. But most importantly, it delivers efficiency and density, which enables our partners to save very precious real estate, have more compact servers and racks. So this is leadership compute for the next era of cloud and network infrastructure. So Xeon 6 Plus launches with the strength of our ecosystem that's been built over decades and decades of data center development both from a hardware but also from a software and infrastructure perspective. Moreover, our ODM partners are bringing Xeon 6 Plus solutions to the market today. So these range from full rack scale deployments to server level designs. Xeon 6 Plus joins our lineup of data center processors next to our already launched Xeon 6 based on P-cores. Both of these categories and classes of solutions deliver new performance and choice for all the enterprises whose infrastructure backbone is built on x86 and Xeon. This is critical for enterprises that need to increasingly balance preparing for AI workloads but at the same time running their day-to-day mission critical applications. So let's switch gears and talk about how Intel is certifying the deployment of intelligence at scale. It's undeniable that enterprise infrastructure today will have to evolve to keep up with the AI demand. Recent research forecasts that AI inference workloads are expected to become 40% of all data center power demand and much more than they are today. So we have these two paradigms where we have the foundational data centers keep on running their traditional workloads but at the same time they have to figure out ways of building their infrastructures to serve intelligence at scale and this is where Intel and Xeon 6 Plus come in. Now up to now, training split the data center into two. So on one hand we have CPU-led enterprise infrastructure and the other hand we have GPU-heavy AI factories and that was a very clear divide for a while, right, and we've all been accustomed to that reality. But as AI moves into real workflows, data tools, governance, the needs change. The next wave is not just about training models. It is about putting AI to work. So let's look at why Agentic AI changes the infrastructure equation. The way AI inference works is straightforward. We take a prompt. It gets fed into an LLM where it spends most time reasoning about the prompt. And we've all seen this. We've done this thousands of times. And out comes an answer. In this case, a lot of time is spent computing the large language model which is mostly GPU and compute intensive. Now the way agentic AI works is radically different. It's given goals rather than prompts. So we've all seen the different types of loop that people are running on this agentic AI. It's also very iterative in nature but also prompted by automation and thinking, planning, acting, and reflecting are a natural way of these agents interacting with us. As it works, it uses tools, reads and writes files, checks rules and other aspects that were, you know, in the traditional realm of CPUs and x86. And then for each step, the type of underlying compute needs is very different. And we'll show that in a bit. This is particularly important as agents scale up their work, spawning new agents that work concurrently. And the category and the complexity of agents are going to be very different depending on the complexity of the work. That's the main reason that there's such a rapid increase in CPU demand for Agentic AI. The CPU orchestrates the show. Now, what we're seeing is we're also seeing the balance and the ratio of one CPU to 8 GPUs and more is coming much closer to par. So, let's take a look at the real example. John.

Thanks, Kavouk. You talked about how Agentic AI is changing the compute requirements. Let's take a look at a real example. I have a traditional AI inference setup on the left-hand side of the screen. Let's send a request. Write a Python function that calls an OpenAI compatible chat completions API. The model gets the response, generates code, and sends the request back. Take a look at the slider on the top of the screen. GPU dominates nearly 7 to 1, GPU heavy. In contrast, let's take a look at an Agentic AI system. Across the top, look at the pipeline stages. Green is GPU work. Blue is CPU work. Linting is happening on our Xeon 6 Plus processor with efficiency cores. Web fetch and compile is happening on our Xeon 6 performance cores and unit testing is coming back and running on our Xeon 6 Plus efficiency cores. The right class CPU for each stage of the pipeline. Take a look at the slider across the top again. We're near par, but CPU heavy this time. What's this look like when we multiply that by millions of queries a day? As you mentioned, each Xeon 6 Plus processor has up to 288 cores. That's 576 cores per two-socket server. When we look at that from a rack scale perspective, that gives us over 36,000 cores per 32U of compute space.

Thank you, John. Wow, this is pretty amazing and some data to ponder on. By far the density of CPU we showed has the highest density per rack ever. But also looking at the number of agents and these are the new metrics that are emerging. We can safely say that that particular rack can run up to 150,000 agents. So good news to all the CIOs in the audience. Now your very expensive GPUs can see more utilization because of our solutions. Now both Xeon 6 with P-cores and E-cores are built for intelligence at scale. There are different cores of course but we've seen the workloads that require very high performance cores pushing the frequencies but also there's a need for very high density, power efficient cores. So we've seen all the workloads, we've run all the analysis and we are delivering these solutions to all of you now. Having said that, we are working with our customers and partners to make sure that each solution is tailored to your needs. So, I'd like to welcome Lip-bu back on stage to talk about the server and rack scale solutions that our partners are working on. Thank you.

Thank you, Lip-bu. I'm so excited to be here today. Wonderful product and amazing event. Lip-bu, Intel and Foxconn have been working together for many decades and Foxconn has been instrumental in driving technology innovation in Taiwan and around the world. Yeah, that's right. I'm proud of the work we have done together from AI servers to data centers and to edge computing all together. And today we're excited to announce the next step in our partnership. Intel and Foxconn are working together to develop rack scale products built upon Intel Xeon processors. Together we will focus on exploring the development, integration, and commercialization of differentiated rack scale AI infrastructure solutions leveraging complementary architectures to address diverse AI workload requirements. Yeah, together we will continue to deepen and expand our partnership, unlocking new opportunities ahead. Through this collaboration, we will deliver system-level AI solutions to our joint customers, enabling more integrated and scalable computing environments. This marks an important step ahead and we look forward to unveiling more in the near future. Thank you, Lip-bu.

Thank you, Lip-bu. And over the next few months we have announced a few updates on our joint development partnership. Can we talk a little bit more about the work that Intel and SambaNova are doing together?

Absolutely. So, let's see who comes next. So, turn it back over to you.