To date, Intel has shoveled nearly $50 billion into new foundry and packaging operations and more are expected before the end of the year. However, Intel Foundry Service’s (IFS) master plan isn’t simply build it and they will come.

The chipmaker this week announced a $1 billion initiative to help customers accelerate their development pipelines around IFS. Not only is Intel building the fabs, it's stepping in to help customers tailor their designs around them.

“It takes a veritable army of software, design services, intellectual properties, electronic design automation tools and flows, and other technologies to implement a complex chip design in silicon,” IFS president Randhir Thakur wrote in a blog post. “We are an extension of our customers’ innovation pipeline.”

Realizing IFS’s mission will also require Intel’s foundry operations to support a broader range of technologies than it had previously. Beyond the x86 architecture, Thakur expressed his commitment to supporting both Arm and RISC-V architectures.

The open ecosystem approach taken by IFS echoes CEO Pat Gelsinger’s previous commitments to supporting open innovation, including with its competitors.

“Innovation thrives in an open, democratized environment where people can connect, communicate, and respond together to new stimuli,” he wrote in an October 2021 blog post. “Now more than ever, the challenges of the world demand innovation. They demand transparency. They are solved in the open.”

More practically, the initiative addresses a glaring problem for the chipmaker. Intel has decades of experience in semiconductor manufacturing, but most of it is centered around the x86 architecture it pioneered. The architecture underpins most of the vendor’s chips today, but beyond AMD, which reverse-engineered the technology in the 80s, only a handful of chipmakers employ the technology in their designs.

Instead, Arm holds the title as the most widely deployed microarchitecture in the world. And unless Intel can support customers already deeply invested in the Arm ecosystem, its addressable market will be severely limited compared to rivals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics.

While Intel will support Arm, the vendor is betting big on RISC-V.

RISC-V is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture not dissimilar to Arm, Power, or Sun SPARC. But unlike previous RISC processors, RISC-V is entirely open source and freely available to anyone.

The architecture has only been kicking around for a little over a decade, but it’s seen a flurry of interest from chipmakers like SiFive in recent years.

“RISC-V is a great fit for our open ecosystem vision, which is why we are making investments and building partnerships that will empower the ecosystem and help drive further adoption of RISC-V,” Thakur wrote.

Intel this week joined RISC-V International, a global nonprofit organization championing the RISC-V instruction set architecture and extensions. The chipmaker also teamed up with leading RISC-V chipmakers Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive, and Ventana Micro Systems to offer foundry customers a range of validated RISC-V IP cores, performance-optimized for different market segments right out the gate.

“I'm delighted that Intel, the company that pioneered the microprocessor 50 years ago, is now a member of RISC-V International,” David Patterson, who vice chairs the RISC-V International board of directors, said in a statement.

Intel plans to offer three products based on the RISC-V architecture in the near future:

• Partner products manufactured by IFS
• RISC-V core licenses
• Modular RISC-V chiplets, which can be packaged alongside complementary accelerators

The news comes just weeks after Intel announced a $20 billion foundry expansion, which would see two leading-edge fabs constructed in Ohio.

The project is expected to balloon to more than $100 billion over the next decade with six additional fabs planned. The mega-fab’s future is, however, deeply intertwined with the $52 billion CHIPs for America Act.

The proposed bill aims to bolster U.S. semiconductor supply chains and reduce reliance on Asia-Pacific foundry operators like TSMC and Samsung Electronics.

Likewise, Intel’s plans for a European foundry expansion are closely tied to the outcome of a similar bill introduced by the European Union earlier this week. The European Chips Act proposes $49 billion in public and private funding to support foundry expansion in the region, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Gelsinger has met repeatedly with European leaders, including EU Commissioner Thierry Breton last spring, to negotiate a foundry project in the region.

Last fall, Intel expressed a desire to construct two fabs in the region pending financial backing. The company has yet to disclose the location or scope of the project.