Global chip shortage not ending soon — Intel CEO

Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger has shared his thoughts on the ongoing global chip shortage, claiming it’ll continue to be a problem for some time. Speaking ahead of the company’s third quarter report, he says he expects the shortage to persist until at least 2023.

In his interview with CNBC, Gelsinger says, although things are going to get a lot better every other quarter in next year, the normal supply-demand balance may not still be met until 2023.

As it turns out however, Intel’s close competition AMD seems to be having more positive expectations. According to AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, things will get better next year. Speaking at the 2021 Code Conference, the Taiwan-born CEO admitted that though supply would most likely be tight, but as long as production capacity is improved upon, then, everything gets better.

Why is Intel seemingly pessimistic about the global chip shortage?

Intel’s less-than-cheerful approach to its prediction of when the global chip shortage will end, might be understandable though. The prediction follows the announcing of a 2-percent dip in the revenue for the Client Computing Group (CCG). Recall that CCG is responsible for producing Intel’s desktop and laptop chips. Also, there’s another 5-percent drop in the sales of notebooks, which Intel has claimed is as a result of “notebook ecosystem constraints”. The meaning of this is that, companies that produces laptops just do not have enough parts to go around.

Explaining more deeply about the shortages, Gelsinger said the problem isn’t always shortages in chips specifically. He then added that sometimes, the problem is with combinations of parts, which they call ‘match sets’. He noted that there are times the company may have the CPU, but no LCD, or no Wi-Fi. According to Gelsinger, data centers are specifically struggling with some of the networking or ethernet chips and some of the power chips.