The CEO of Intel now claims that the chip shortage will ‘drift’ into 2024

Six months after projecting that the worldwide chip scarcity will endure until at least 2023, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is now saying that we may not be out of the woods until 2024.

“We expect the overall semiconductor shortage will now drift into 2024, from our original predictions of 2023, simply because the shortages have already reached equipment and some of those plant ramps will be more problematic,” he said on Friday to CNBC.

But, while that may sound a touch doom-and-gloom, keep in mind that the “chip shortage” is a complicated, dynamic phenomenon that does not affect every type of chip at every moment. As time passes, some industries and parts have been struck more than others. In reality, Intel’s own CPUs are doing admirably. “For the first time in years, Intel fabs and substrate supply are on the verge of fulfilling our customers’ demand,” Gelsinger said during the company’s Q1 2022 earnings call yesterday.

When Gelsinger believes the scarcity will last until 2024, he’s referring to the industry’s capacity to meet the demand for new goods manufactured on new lines, rather than merely existing ones. “As an IDM, we expect the industry to have problems in areas such as foundry capacity and tool availability until at least 2024,” he stated on yesterday’s call. According to Digitimes, chipmaking equipment vendors are now backed up for more than 18 months, up from six months just last year.

In other words, while CPUs, GPUs, and game consoles were among the most visible commodities affected by shortages, it appears that supply and demand are already beginning to balance. However, networking chip vendors are still facing a substantial chip shortage: Gelsinger cited ethernet as a particularly challenging “ecosystem supply restriction” that has hampered PC sales.

But that isn’t why Intel’s Client Computing Group (which includes consumer CPUs) is down 13% this quarter. Intel attributed this to a “ramp-down of the Apple CPU and modem business,” “OEM inventory burn,” and “lower consumer and education demand” — essentially, schools are buying fewer Chromebooks, and Apple has all but completely transitioned away from Intel to its own M1 processor, leaving Intel laptops in the dust.

By the way, Intel is one of the firms investing substantially in new production lines, with new fabs being built in Ohio, Arizona, and Germany, though the present timeline predicts that none of those new fabs will be operational until the chip shortage is resolved. The first new factories in Chandler, Arizona, are not expected to debut until 2024.