Intel says chip shortage to last to 2024

A year ago, Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger said the chip shortage wouldn’t be over until 2023.

Now make that 2024.

“We expect the industry will continue to see challenges until at least 2024 in areas like foundry capacity and tool availability,” he told a conference call yesterday.

Adding to the supply crunch is the fact that TSMC is gobbling up chipmaking equipment, making tools hard to come by, Gelsinger said.

The forecast about 2024 came amid the gloomiest earnings beat you’d ever seen.

Yes, the Santa Clara chip giant brought in $18.35 billion in revenue in the first quarter, a nose ahead of analysts’ predicted $18.31 billion.

But the champagne wasn’t quite out exactly, since this was down 7% on a year before. The company’s gross margins shrank meanwhile to 50.4% from 55.2%.

Analysts “have been crabby for ages” about Intel’s declining margins, tweeted reporter Stephen Shankland.

But the company’s new finance chief, David Zinsner, predicted these will start growing later in 2022 after PC makers burn through inventory they piled up during the pandemic.

When the chips are down

All this comes after a busy quarter when Intel announced it’s buying Tower Semiconductor and building new chip factories in Germany and Ohio.

Gelsinger, who has been in his post for a year now, calls Intel on his watch “the greatest turnaround story in history.” But it’s a turnabout from the disastrous summer of 2020 which saw nearly everything go wrong.

Within a mere few weeks the company was pushing back its 7nm node from 2021 to 2023, losing a world-class chip designer and head of its 10,000-person semiconductor engineering team in Jim Keller, and then getting dumped by one of its key customers, Apple.

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