Wipro wins deal to design Intel’s latest chips

Though Wipro did not disclose the exact size of the deal, two senior industry consultants said under conditions of anonymity that the deal with Intel Foundry is expected to be one of Wipro’s largest deal signings in the past three years. Mint could not independently confirm the size of the deal. Emails sent to Wipro and Intel Foundry did not immediately receive responses.

In an exchange filing, Wipro said that its deal with Intel will cater to chip designs for clients across automotive, industrial and telecommunications verticals, and be used for “generative AI-driven designs”. The collaborative chip design project is a part of Wipro’s $1-billion ‘ai360’ ecosystem of services, with which the IT services firm will seek to target new clients for AI-first services, going forward.

Atul Kapur, vice-president and business head for hi-tech at Wipro, said in a statement that the partnership with Intel Foundry “marks a significant step towards becoming a part of the semiconductor industry” for the company. “This… supports chip supply and chip manufacturing. We will deliver silicon devices to our clients with proven industry-standard flows and process technologies from Intel Foundry. We will be targeting new startup markets, especially in the generative AI space, helping our clients further shorten the time to market,” he said.

The ’18A’ node is significant, since this denotes the latest technology from Intel’s chips, which Wipro engineers will also help manufacture and custom-design.

As part of the deal, Wipro will take custom chip designs from clients, and use Intel’s process nodes to let businesses get access to required chips. Custom chip designs are key to building fully customized processors for specific markets—built to need in terms of efficiency and performance. On 4 December, Gartner projected a 16.8% annualized revenue growth from the semiconductor industry in which custom chip design is expected to play a key role.

The new deal is expected to be of significance to Wipro, the two consultants cited above said. Even as industry body Nasscom projected cumulative industry revenue to cross $250 billion this year, Wipro stares at a decline of up to 4.1% in operating revenue for this year.

Wipro’s former head of large deals, Stephanie Trautman, also stepped down from the company on 31 December. On 11 December, Mint reported that in more than the past three years, Wipro had only won a single mega deal valued at $700 million—with German retailer Metro AG. Typically, mega deals are valued at $1 billion and above, and are seen as key to the overall health of IT services firms.

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Published: 21 Feb 2024, 09:13 PM IST