00:00Ed Ludlow just getting off the phone, I believe, right now with the CEO, Lit Bu Tan.
00:04He joins us right now. Ed, what did you just have to say?
00:07Well, supply issues that Intel can control.
00:09The way that Lit Bu explained it is that in the fourth quarter gone, the demand was there.
00:13But to meet demand, they had to clear out inventories.
00:16And he made an admission, essentially, that, you know, in the current period,
00:21yields, production volumes have not been to the standards that he wants to hold Intel.
00:25So that is the issue at hand.
00:27They are having execution problems, internal wafer supply, to meet what he keeps talking about as being robust demand.
00:33And you're exactly right that, you know, at the midpoint, the forecast is below what the street was talking about.
00:39But particularly in data center, the story intact that they are benefiting from the necessity of having CPU,
00:46even if the world is very focused on NVIDIA's GPUs.
00:50It's just Intel's not doing a very good job of getting it out there to the marketplace.
00:53Yeah, definitely. And that was in the commentary as well, that conviction.
00:57In CPUs. Talk to us a little bit about what we're seeing in their foundry business.
01:01In the fourth quarter, actually, revenue a little bit better than expectations.
01:06Looking out into 2026, what does it look like in terms of their customer base and potentially adding new ones?
01:13Yeah, the street and the industry is waiting for Intel to tell us something of substance about the 14A process.
01:18And again, like Lit Buu was very disciplined.
01:21He basically said until he has volume commitments from a customer he can name, he's not going to go about the exercise of ramping the relevant foundries to support that.
01:31They are engaged with multiple customers who are working with Intel's teams on the engineering and IP sharing for the 14A process.
01:38But for now, it's not real. And he was candid in the interview that, like, I'm not going to tell you, yes, this customer is real because it's not there yet.
01:46But everyone's waiting for that because you guys were talking about the U.S. ownership of this stock prior to the break, right?
01:54And the idea is that that is the direction of travel for this country.
01:58They are looking for a national champion to onshore chip manufacturing, not for Intel as its own customer, but for third parties.
02:04We don't have any names. And that would have been something that moved the needle for the street.
02:08The stock continues to bounce around now, back down 5% in the after hours.
02:11The stock continues to bounce around now, back down 5% in the after hours.
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