Chip shortages to continue to 2023 — Intel CEO

The ongoing global chip shortage is expected to continue for longer than AMD’s CEO Dr Lisa Su anticipated at the 2021 Code Conference.

Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger, in the company’s Q3 earnings, has warned the chip shortage may extend until at least 2023.

In an interview with CNBC yesterday, Gelsinger said: “We’re in the worst of it now, every quarter next year we’ll get incrementally better, but they’re not going to have supply-demand balance until 2023.”

Across the industry, from central processor makers like Intel and AMD to graphics processor makers like Nvidia, all expect some level of production constraints for the rest of the year and most of 2022.

While this affects the whole industry, Intel’s pessimistic outlook was followed by an announcement of a 2% decline in revenue for its Client Computing Group, which produces its desktop and laptop chips. This decline was mostly caused by a 5% drop in Intel notebook chip sales, which is caused by manufacturers having difficulty gathering enough components to assemble large numbers of laptops.

These component shortages aren’t necessarily on Intel’s part, says Gelsinger: “We call it match sets, where we may have the CPU, but you don’t have the LCD, or you don’t have the Wi-Fi. Data centres are particularly struggling with some of the power chips and some of the networking or ethernet chips.”

It’s not all bad news though. The desktop PC segment of the Client Computing Group saw a revenue increase of 20%, which is healthy but shows the extent to which notebook PCs outnumber their desktop counterparts. The company’s total revenue rose by 5% year-on-year to $18.1-bn, which can be attributed to its strong data centre partnerships, and Internet of Things deployments.

To read the full results, visit Intel’s financial results page here.