Foxconn and Intel partner to build AI data center rack systems

Foxconn and Intel announced plans to jointly physique rackscale AI infrastructure for information center, hyperscale, and quality halfway deployments, with Foxconn providing strategy integration capabilities for racks built connected Intel Xeon processors.

The announcement came astatine Computex 2026 successful Taipei and besides involves AI spot institution SambaNova. The companies are demonstrating production-ready racks that brace Intel Xeon processors with SambaNova SN-50 Reconfigurable Dataflow Units, which are designed to present AI inference show with improved outgo and powerfulness efficiency, the companies said. Foxconn besides plans to manufacture a CPU-dense variant of the infrastructure for workloads that bash not necessitate further acceleration, including cost-optimized inference and information processing.

Beyond the rack systems, Intel said Foxconn would research collaboration successful plan services and customized silicon development. Edge computing usage cases — among them robotics, astute cities, and astute manufacturing — are besides portion of the collaboration's scope, The Wall Street Journal reported.

"Our collaboration with Intel volition harvester the strengths of some companies crossed computing platforms, strategy integration, and planetary proviso concatenation capabilities," Foxconn Chairman and CEO Young Liu said successful a statement.

"Together, we are accelerating the transportation of end-to-end platforms that unlock caller capabilities and widen the interaction of AI worldwide," Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said successful a statement.

Alongside the partnership, Intel announced its Xeon 6+ processor family, built connected the company's 18A manufacturing process and designed for high-density, scale-out workloads including agentic AI applications. A azygous liquid-cooled rack utilizing Xeon 6+ tin present 36,864 cores successful 32U of compute space, Intel said.

Intel has been gathering its lawsuit that the displacement from AI exemplary grooming toward inference and agentic workloads is returning the CPU to a much salient relation successful information centers. The institution reported first-quarter 2026 gross of $13.6 billion, up 7% from a twelvemonth earlier, with its Data Center and AI portion posting $5.1 cardinal successful revenue, a 22% year-over-year gain. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said astatine the clip that the displacement toward inference and agentic AI was driving request for the company's CPUs.

Intel banal roseate 4.43% connected Wednesday pursuing the Computex announcements, closing astatine $112.71, earlier falling successful Thursday trading arsenic portion of a broader tech selloff. Neither institution disclosed the fiscal presumption of the deal, identified immoderate customers, oregon said erstwhile the collaboration would nutrient results.