Intel’s CEO says the Intel Classiq acquisition will turn the company into a “full stack revenue-generating” quantum computing business. Lip-Bu Tan made the remarks on Intel’s third quarter earnings call. There he also made a bold case for CPUs in AI, estimating that demand tied to agentic AI could push the server CPU market past $200 billion over five years.
Why Intel sees a big CPU opportunity in agentic AI
Tan argued that energy efficiency matters more and more as AI buildouts grow. In his view, GPUs are great at “thinking tasks,” while “deterministic CPU are far more efficient at doing tasks.” He put the gap in concrete terms: “While GPU reasoning query run as high as multiple watt-hours of energy, a single CPU query could cost only joules of energy.”
That efficiency pitch underpins his market forecast. Tan said that even conservative estimates for the number of digital agents, and the agents served per CPU, point to a massive dollar and unit market. By Intel’s estimates, server CPU demand, largely driven by agentic workloads, could grow as much as five times, from $40 billion to more than $200 billion over five years. “This makes the opportunity for Intel enormous,” he said.
Tan has also described how he uses the technology himself. Late last month, he said he runs AI agents overnight to do his “homework” and relies on their output in the morning. Related coverage in Nvidia Details Groq 3 LPX Architecture and First Third-Party Benchmarks shows how fast the AI hardware race is moving across the industry.
What the Intel Classiq acquisition adds
The Intel Classiq acquisition gives Intel a strong position in quantum software. Tan first talked about Classiq in September, noting its place in the software side of the quantum industry. He said then that the company had clear market visibility, and he was impressed by how it integrates classical and quantum computing.
On the earnings call, he praised Classiq’s “overarching hardware-agnostic software platform layer,” which he said “provides a gateway for more consumers to explore quantum computing.” He called it “a wonderful complement to our already strong internal quantum hardware and software stacks.”
The deal also widens Intel’s product lineup. Tan said it lets the company extend its compute platform to include QPUs (quantum processing units) in addition to CPUs, GPUs and ASICs. “Post-acquisition, Intel will become a full stack revenue-generating quantum computing company,” he said.
For U.S. readers, the message is that Intel is betting on two fronts: everyday server CPUs that run AI agents, and a commercial path into quantum computing. Tan has stressed that commercialization comes first. In a different corner of the tech market, Samsung Galaxy S26 FE vs S25 FE: Explaining the $50 Price Increase looks at how pricing decisions land with American buyers.
المصدر: Wccftech
