The companies will also expand the co-development of custom infrastructure processing units (IPUs), which help accelerate and manage data center tasks by offloading them from CPUs.

This chip development partnership, which started in 2021, will focus on custom ASIC-based IPUs.

This expansion comes as the industry is hungry for CPUs. While GPUs are used for developing and training AI models, CPUs are crucial for running AI models and within general AI infrastructure.

“AI is reshaping how infrastructure is built and scaled,” Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said in a company press release. “Scaling AI requires more than accelerators — it requires balanced systems. CPUs and IPUs are central to delivering the performance, efficiency and flexibility modern AI workloads demand.”