Katarzyna Petru
After months of silence and delays, Intel has officially announced its return to the competition in the AI chip market. At the Open Compute Summit, the company showcased a new graphics processor for data centres – Crescent Island – set to launch in 2026. This chip is intended to be the foundation of Intel's new approach to artificial intelligence – one that is more open, modular, and focused on practical applications rather than just numbers in benchmarks.
“This chip has been designed with inference in mind, for the real-world operation of AI models, not just their training. We want to provide the best performance-to-price ratio – true performance per dollar,” said Sachin Katti, Intel's Chief Technology Officer.
Crescent Island – AI and Efficiency Optimised Chip
Crescent Island will be a GPU architecture dedicated to data centres, designed to handle tasks related to AI – from running language models to real-time analytics. The chip will offer 160 GB of memory, although it will not be the fast HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) known from AMD Instinct or Nvidia Hopper solutions. Instead, Intel has opted for its own proven solutions from consumer cards to reduce costs and improve energy efficiency.
While this sounds like a compromise, in practice it could be a sensible move – Intel is targeting customers looking for a cheaper, scalable alternative to Nvidia's expensive platforms.
New strategy: open ecosystem and modular design
Katti emphasised that Intel is focusing on an open and modular collaboration model with customers. This means that companies will be able to combine Intel chips with solutions from other manufacturers – including GPUs from Nvidia or AMD. “We don’t want to lock customers into one ecosystem. We’re going for a mix and match, because we know that’s what the AI market looks like today,” said Katti.
This approach could prove crucial – especially in times when large cloud companies, like Amazon or Google, are creating their own AI chips and looking for ways to integrate with existing infrastructure.
Collaboration with Nvidia and the plan to return to annual releases
A surprise for the market was the news that Nvidia invested 5 billion dollars in Intel, acquiring about 4% of its shares. Both companies are set to collaborate on developing new processors for PCs and data centres – which may be an attempt to tighten cooperation in the face of increasing competition from AMD and cloud chip manufacturers.
Intel is also planning a new release rhythm: one AI chip per year, similar to Nvidia and AMD. This is intended to allow the company to respond more quickly to market changes and the development of generative AI, which saw demand explode after the launch of ChatGPT.
Challenges: delays, memory and lost momentum
However, not everything looks rosy. Crescent Island is emerging at a time when Intel is still chasing the competition, and its previous projects, such as Gaudi and Falcon Shores, have been put on hold. The chip will also not receive the top-end HBM memory, which means it may not match the flagship offerings of its competitors in pure performance.
However, CEO Lip-Bu Tan assures that the company is getting back on track:
“We no longer just want to chase the market. We want to get back in the game – with our own identity and a real alternative to the current leaders.”
What next?
Intel plans to expand its AI portfolio, gradually introducing chips with varying performance levels – from inexpensive inference cards to specialised processors for large language models. Crescent Island is set to be the first step towards restoring Intel's reputation as a serious player in the artificial intelligence sector.
