COMPUTEX 2026 CEO Keynote: Intel

Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. 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 at 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. Thank you.

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 the desire to grow, the mindset of win-win and cooperation is all over 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 on 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 the 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, 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, 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 measured 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 USBC 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. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. This is the ARC G3. I think a beautiful chip, more beautiful than what was presented yesterday at a keynote. Okay. 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. Thank you. Thank you. 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 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.

Well, Aravind, welcome. You and I have been talking about hybrid compute for a while. The reason why is clear: privacy, cost, performance. And let's talk about how to make this work.

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 work together to create hybrid agentic inference. And so what we're showing today is just the start. Hybrid agentic inference is how we maximize token value per watt per user.

Yep.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Lipu. Wow. It's so great to be here specifically at 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 see 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 are 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 the demand for these workloads to grow in size and capacity between now and 2030 from 80 gigawatts to about 100 gigawatts. 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 MB of L3 cache built with our Intel 18A technology. And we can't emphasize enough the value that Intel technology 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 the racks. So this is a 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 enabling the deployment of intelligence at scale. It's undeniable that enterprise infrastructure today will have to evolve to keep up with 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 on 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. 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 all seen the different types of loops 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 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 seeing the balance and the ratio of one CPU to 8 GPU and more is coming much closer to par. So let's take a look at the real example. John, thanks Kavo.

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 7:1, 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 32 bays 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 is 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. Your 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 run all the workloads, done 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.

I'm so excited to be here today. Wonderful product and amazing event.

Yeah, that's right, Lipu. 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 integrations and commercialization of differentiated rack scale AI infrastructure solutions leveraging complementary architecture to address diverse AI workload requirements.

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 Lipu.

Fantastic. Thank you for having me.

Thank you, Lip-Bu.

Absolutely. We've been busy. Earlier this year, we announced a multi-year collaboration to deliver high performance, cost efficient AI inference solutions based on Xeon infrastructure. We've been building something really special. Excited to show you today. This is the SM50 Samova we announced earlier this year. Rack scale AI infrastructure built for agentic workloads. It uses Intel Xeon 6 processors with Samanova SM50 RDUs and is shipping to customers later this year. Today, we're also excited to demonstrate the world's first heterogeneous disaggregated inference using Samanova's RDU with Intel's CPU and Nvidia GPUs. What you're about to see is the same prompt, the same model running side by side, two different stacks. So the one on the left is GPUs, RDUs, and CPUs. This disaggregated inference and this one on my right is GPUs on their own. They both get fed the same prompt in the same model just different stacks. The disaggregated inference stack is taking off. And what's happening here is you have the Xeon 6 processors doing all the tooling execution. You have Samanova RDUs doing the decode and generating all of the tokens. And then you got the GPUs performing the prompt caching and the faster prefill reducing overall time. When all three chips are working together, you dramatically reduce the end to end latency for the fastest agentic AI and the other side the GPU stack is still working away. So the initial result of our work is disaggregated inference with GPUs, RDUs, CPUs is the fastest. Our analysis found it to be two to three times faster than just GPUs alone. And this gives us an early look at how fast this can be.

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

Great. Thank you. Lip-Bu, good to see you.

Thank you. Thank you, my friend.

Yeah, first of all, I'm excited to be here at Computex to join you at this wonderful event. For us it's been quite incredible. There's been a huge focus right now to bring AI to enterprises around the globe. We want to make it usable. We want to make it impactful for the organizations that we work with. You know, we have over 90 portfolio companies and well over half of them have now converted to agentic solutions and with over 750 million users of our software that really translates to over 10 billion agents. That's why we've launched Vector Core Computer VC2 with our partners at Cambium Capital to offer the world's first commercially available architecture for disaggregated inference. This novel agentic neocloud is built to deliver the fastest enterprise inference throughput of any architecture to date. The demo you just witnessed with Rodrigo was conducted live in our Los Angeles data center and we have over 50 deployments planned in the US which are targeted to convert existing data centers to inference data centers.

Of course. I'm excited to share that Together AI is the first commercial customer and is excited to use this architecture as a service to accelerate inference workloads. We expect many of our enterprise software companies and their customers to quickly follow as the demands for inference keep growing and this is more efficient than anything they previously had access to. Most critically VC2 is built and utilizes the Samanova stack which is an aircooled data center. We believe it will deliver what enterprise customers and communities are asking for which is reliable, low latency, low cost inference at scale. Partnering to advance AI is one of the best ways to develop this transformational technology making it usable and economically viable for enterprises worldwide.

Always a pleasure, Lip-Bu. Thank you. Congratulations. 14 more months. We're excited to see what you're doing.

Thank you.

Hi Lip-Bu, thank you. Thank you so much. A very good afternoon to you guys. Purpose-built silicon. This has been a journey that the industry has been using almost for the last decade or so and especially hyperscalers have tapped into this to its full potential and shown us the benefits in every way possible. Lip-Bu last year you challenged us to see in this space given the fantastic assets and the breadth of assets that we have at Intel how could we be relevant to this, not just be focused on the stuff that we do internally, how do we bring this out to the external world and do something more. With that said we had a proposition, we've been working on it and today I'm very happy to share a couple of good outcomes that we have. The first on the hyperscaler side we have Google and Intel have gone into a partnership wherein Intel is delivering what is called as the infrastructure processing unit. I would call it Intel Processing Unit actually but infrastructure processing unit which is a piece of silicon very vital for hyperscalers performance and that journey continues and by the way this is a deployment today so it is not just something that we are doing but it's already designed and being deployed. While this is working, Intel as a company has been pretty active in the telco market and in this telco market another marquee customer Ericsson has been partnering with us and Ericsson chooses us wherein Intel delivers the next generation infrastructure silicon for at global scale for them across the board. This just gives you a sneak preview at the highest level to see the kind of work that's happening in the purpose-built silicon space which is a very exciting space and more importantly a high growth space. I was just thinking what better place than Computex and Taipei where custom silicon really is the name of the game here to announce that Intel has officially entered this market. So looking forward to working with many of you guys and see how we can be relevant to you and some of your aspirational goals on silicon. Okay. Thank you Lip-Bu.

Yes, absolutely. More to come. Yes.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Eddie Chang. I'm a neurosurgeon at UCSF and co-founder of Echo Neuro Technologies. For decades, AI has been brain inspired, meaning borrowing ideas from neuroscience at a distance. Neuromorphic computing has carried that vision the furthest. It built silicon around the brain's core principles like spikes, sparse communication, memory, and compute all in the same place. That architecture is right. But what's been missing is direct evidence of how the brain actually performs the computation. That's now within our reach. For the first time, we can study how the human cortex computes language in real time at the resolution where computation actually happens. This opens a whole new possibility. Algorithms that are not just brain inspired, but new ones that are trained on the brain activity itself, measured against the brain itself. That's the shift in our collaboration with Intel. Together, we're developing brain trained algorithms for streaming speech that approach the efficiency of biological computation. The payoff runs both ways. AI that's faster, lighter, and closer to how we actually think, and new tools to restore speech to people who have lost it. Together with Intel, we're building AI that learns from the most powerful computer ever discovered, the human brain. We're excited about what's ahead. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Joseph Wu and I'm a professor of medicine and director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute as well as the co-founder of Greenstone Biosciences. Thank you so much for including me in Computex. Intel and Greenstone are working together to speed up the development of new medicines. Our partnership combines state-of-the-art human genetics and biology from Greenstone with advanced AI computing from Intel so that we can scale data processing, storage, and analysis. Greenstone has built the world's largest bio bank of human induced pluripotent stem cells. From just 10 ccs of your blood, we can make your brain, heart, liver, kidney, gut, and any type of organoids in your body that are genetically identical to the patient. This will then allow us to test existing and new medications more quickly and at a lower cost. I believe the combination of human biology and AI computing will help shape the future of biomedicine in the next decade. And this is why we're so excited about the partnership between Intel and Greenstone Biosciences. Thank you very much and enjoy the event.

Hello Computex. I'm Toshiaki Tokunaga, CEO of Hitachi. For decades, Hitachi and Intel have worked together to solve key challenges for society. And today, we are bringing our strengths even closer. By combining Intel's advanced computing with Hitachi's industrial strength in the physical world, we will create intelligent solutions that will benefit both businesses and society. Thank you, Lip-Bu. I look forward to our future together.

Hi Lip-Bu, as a customer of Intel, we all know that global semiconductor demand has hit a high record. In 2023, Siemens and Intel already joined forces to meet it. And now we are taking our collaboration to the next level. We are expanding our partnership across the entire value chain from design to manufacturing to chip applications in Siemens' products. We improve design quality through EDA automation and software solutions built with Gen AI. We partner on all areas of the manufacturing process including product lifecycle management, automation, electrification, quality and sustainability. And what makes this even more relevant for us, the chips created in this value chain will be used in our own Siemens' products. Looking forward to what's coming up.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the Intel Computex 2026 keynote. Thank you for joining us this afternoon to witness the future of technology. We look forward to seeing you again at future Intel events. And please don't forget your personal belongings.