Intel Foundry signs first named customer to challenge TSMC
Intel's manufacturing division has secured its first publicly named outside customer, a symbolic but limited step in its campaign to break TSMC's grip on the global chip market.
Intel Foundry will design and manufacture the Fortinet Security Processor 6, the custom silicon inside FortiGate firewalls. The partnership is the first time Intel has named an external corporate customer for its manufacturing division since chief executive Lip-Bu Tan took over in March 2025.
The deal is a necessary win for Intel as it attempts to reposition itself as a viable alternative to Taiwan's TSMC. European policymakers, who are spending billions to build domestic chip capacity under the EU Chips Act, are watching Intel's turnaround closely as a bellwether for Western semiconductor independence.
Fortinet is moving production of its next-generation firewall chip from TSMC, which built the previous SP5 processor. The new SP6 will be built on Intel's Intel 4 manufacturing node, a process the company had previously reserved exclusively for its own products. The chip is expected to use a chiplet design, breaking from the single-block architecture of the 2023 model. Fortinet chief executive Ken Xie said the agreement would "accelerate and strengthen our ASIC strategy."
Designing custom chips is rare in an industry that typically buys off-the-shelf processors, but Fortinet has done so for two decades. The cybersecurity firm held a 48% unit share of the firewall appliance market in early 2023, making it a visible partner for Intel to showcase.
However, the limitations of the agreement are significant. Intel 4 is an older generation of technology, not the cutting-edge 18A or 14A processes that Intel needs to sell to justify the vast cost of its new factories. Intel has not released production dates or specifications for the SP6.
The financial impact is likely to be modest. The contract covers a fraction of Fortinet’s roughly $2 billion hardware business, far short of the $10-billion-a-year anchor customer Intel revealed it was chasing in an April filing. To date, Intel's foundry relies mostly on its own products and the US government. The announcement lands two days before Intel's quarterly earnings report, offering a symbolic boost to a stock that has already climbed sharply this year.
