Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has publicly invited Tesla CEO Elon Musk to tour his firm's semiconductor fab lines. In a post on the Twitter/X social media platform, Gelsinger said he was thinking of Musk when he was awarded the $8.5 billion in CHIPS Act funding, earlier in the week. Gelsinger has also been courting Musk's arch-foe OpenAI / Sam Altman. It is safe to say that the Intel CEO is trying to get an early start in filling the Intel Foundry Services (IFS) order books, now that the financial fuse has been lit.
@ElonMusk- I was thinking of you at our Chips Act ceremony this week with @POTUS and @SecRaimondo. I am looking forward to giving you a personal tour of our semiconductor fab lines! Follow me so we can migrate our conversations to X on DM."March 23, 2024
In Gelsinger's post, embedded above, you can see the Intel CEO reach out personally to Elon Musk, promising him a tour of Intel's high-tech manufacturing lines. Musk didn't respond publicly, yet, but this may be because Gelsinger also asked him to "follow me," so the pair could chat privately via direct messaging (DM).
Musk would surely be an excellent catch for IFS. This superrich entrepreneur has fingers in many tech pies that are highly reliant on processors, lots of state-of-the-art processors. Musk's firms buy AI accelerators from both AMD and Nvidia, for tasks like machine learning, computer vision, self-driving, Grok, and more, but the firm is also developing its own Dojo ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated-Circuits) with new generations in development.
Looking back at other recent Tom's Hardware headlines, we can see Gelsinger has been very actively touting for business in recent weeks. We know the Intel CEO will have been talking to OpenAI's Sam Altman recently. Altman has floated the ambitious $7 trillion idea of OpenAI building its own fabs to make custom AI chips. However, Altman was at the last Intel Foundry event and surely will have mulled over the possibilities of using Intel's upcoming manufacturing capacity, and expertise. Also, last month, Gelsinger reiterated that Intel is willing to build chips for anyone, including long-time rival AMD.
On Wednesday, Intel's funding dreams came true as it came to a preliminary agreement with the U.S. Commerce Department. The iconic PC chipmaker will get $8.5 billion in direct funding for U.S. projects, plus $11 billion in low-interest loans and a 25% investment tax credit on up to $100 billion of investment. This is great news for Intel's domestic chipmaking plans covering projects in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon. Perhaps delayed building projects such as the Ohio fab will move forward more swiftly, with fresh funding behind their sails.
