TapTechNews August 15th news, according to the Financial Times of the UK reported at noon Beijing time today, SoftBank had talks with Intel to discuss the production of AI chips to compete with NVIDIA, but this plan eventually failed as Intel failed to meet SoftBank's requirements.
Insiders said that in this unreported negotiation, SoftBank originally planned to combine the design of Arm with the technology acceleration of Graphcore to produce a product to compete with NVIDIA.
SoftBank's CEO Masayoshi Son plans to invest billions of dollars in an attempt to place the company at the center of the AI boom. His grand plan encompasses from chip production and software development to powering data centers, which will house SoftBank's processors. Previously, Masayoshi Son has pitched his plan to large technology companies.
Insiders indicated that the negotiation with Intel fell through in recent months. Intel announced a significant cost reduction plan including more than 10,000 layoffs, and SoftBank is now focusing on discussions with TSMC. SoftBank attributes the breakdown of the negotiation to Intel, stating that this chipmaker could not meet its requirements for output and speed. SoftBank also reiterated that given the limited number of chipmakers capable of producing cutting-edge AI processors, the negotiation may be restarted.
Despite the uncertainties in the production plan, Masayoshi Son still pitches his plan to technology giants including Google and Meta, attempting to gain support and financing for his latest project.
According to TapTechNews' previous report, earlier this month, Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a major cost reduction measure - planning to achieve $10 billion (currently about 71.434 billion yuan) in cost savings by 2025, including reducing about 15,000 positions, accounting for about 15% of the total number of employees, and most measures will be completed by the end of this year.