Intel makes chips for other companies. Fortinet will be one of those companies. This counts as news because Intel spent years telling everyone they'd become a foundry and then proceeded to name exactly zero customers willing to say so in public.
Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March 2025. Four months later he landed one corporate client. Fortinet makes security chips. They looked at TSMC, Samsung, and apparently Intel's pitch deck and thought yeah, let's go with the company that's been hemorrhaging market share since 2020.
The foundry business model requires you to make chips for other people without f*cking them up or stealing their designs. Intel has historically struggled with both concepts. They couldn't make their own chips on time for a decade. Now they're promising to make someone else's chips on time. Fortinet's supply chain guy either got a deal so cheap it included free laptops or he's updating his LinkedIn profile as we speak.
Every financial outlet will call this a turning point. Tan gets his first named customer and suddenly Intel's foundry strategy looks credible. Except one customer is not a business. One customer is a pilot program. One customer is what happens when your sales team sends 9,000 emails and exactly one VP replies.
Retail traders will buy Intel shares on this news. They'll imagine Tan turning the foundry into TSMC's rival by 2027. They'll picture Fortinet as the first domino in a chain that includes Apple, Nvidia, and every other chip designer currently giving their money to Taiwan. They won't picture Fortinet's engineers refreshing shipment trackers at 3 a.m. wondering where their wafers are.
Tan's job is to convince the world Intel can build what other people design. Fortinet's job is to not regret this in six months when their chips show up late, hot, and somehow running Windows without permission.
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