HWBRIEF
Intel Foundry is Intel's contract chipmaking business for outside companies, and only $293 million of its $5.8 billion in Q2 2026 revenue came from non Intel customers.
Intel Foundry, the chipmaker's contract manufacturing business for outside companies, reported $5.8 billion in Q2 2026 revenue, up from $4.4 billion a year earlier, and cut its operating loss from $3.2 billion to $2.1 billion. The segment's operating margin swung roughly 35 percentage points, from negative 71.7% to negative 36.2%, on better yields, shorter cycle times, and increased fab scale, per Intel.
The recovery is real. It is also almost entirely internal. Only $293 million of that $5.8 billion, about 5%, came from customers outside Intel, CFO David Zinsner told EE Times. Intel is making its own products more efficiently. It is not yet winning the merchant-foundry bet it has staked the segment on.
The clearest external signal so far is Fortinet. Intel has named the security vendor as a Foundry customer for SP6, Fortinet's next-generation security processor, and an Intel spokesperson told EE Times that Intel is the exclusive manufacturing partner on the Intel 4 process. Fortinet leads architecture and front-end design; Intel handles back-end design services and manufacturing.
Intel has not disclosed the fab, packaging facility, packaging technology, production timetable, committed volumes, contract duration, or financial terms, so SP6 cannot yet be sized against the financial story. The watch items are external-revenue share, Fortinet tape-out, and the ratio of external to internal Foundry revenue as Intel 4 volumes ramp.