Intel announced a new artificial intelligence chip for the data center that it plans to launch next year, in a renewed push to break into the AI chip market, reports Reuters. Crescent Island is a chip built on Intel's Xe3P design, made for fast and efficient AI inference.
“AI is shifting from static training to real-time, everywhere inference—driven by agentic AI,” said Sachin Katti, CTO of Intel. “Scaling these complex workloads requires heterogeneous systems that match the right silicon to the right task, powered by an open software stack. Intel’s Xe architecture data center GPU will provide the efficient headroom customers need —and more value—as token volumes surge.”
Katti also said at the San Jose trade show that the company would release new data center AI chips every year, which would attempt to match the annual cadence set by AMD, NVIDIA and several of the cloud computing companies that make their own chips.
This follows NVIDIA's September purchase of $5 billion worth of Intel stock at $23.28 per share. At time of publication, Intel's share price is north of $36. In the September 18 announcement, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said, “This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem — a fusion of two world-class platforms. Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.”