Foxconn and Intel $INTC announced plans to jointly build rackscale AI infrastructure for data center, hyperscale, and intelligence center deployments, with Foxconn providing system integration capabilities for racks built on Intel Xeon processors.
The announcement came at Computex 2026 in Taipei and also involves AI chip company SambaNova. The companies are demonstrating production-ready racks that pair Intel Xeon processors with SambaNova SN-50 Reconfigurable Dataflow Units, which are designed to deliver AI inference performance with improved cost and power efficiency, the companies said. Foxconn also plans to manufacture a CPU-dense variant of the infrastructure for workloads that do not require additional acceleration, including cost-optimized inference and data processing.
Beyond the rack systems, Intel said Foxconn would explore collaboration in design services and custom silicon development. Edge computing use cases — among them robotics, smart cities, and smart manufacturing — are also part of the collaboration's scope, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"Our collaboration with Intel will combine the strengths of both companies across computing platforms, system integration, and global supply chain capabilities," Foxconn Chairman and CEO Young Liu said in a statement.
"Together, we are accelerating the delivery of end-to-end platforms that unlock new capabilities and extend the impact of AI worldwide," Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a statement.
Alongside the partnership, Intel announced its Xeon 6+ processor family, built on the company's 18A manufacturing process and designed for high-density, scale-out workloads including agentic AI applications. A single liquid-cooled rack using Xeon 6+ can deliver 36,864 cores in 32U of compute space, Intel said.
Intel has been building its case that the shift from AI model training toward inference and agentic workloads is returning the CPU to a more prominent role in data centers. The company reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $13.6 billion, up 7% from a year earlier, with its Data Center and AI unit posting $5.1 billion in revenue, a 22% year-over-year gain. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said at the time that the shift toward inference and agentic AI was driving demand for the company's CPUs.
Intel stock rose 4.43% on Wednesday following the Computex announcements, closing at $112.71, before falling in Thursday trading as part of a broader tech selloff. Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the deal, identified any customers, or said when the collaboration would produce results.