Intel to Manufacture Fortinet’s Next-Gen Firewall ASIC on Intel 4 Process

Intel Foundry Poaches Fortinet from TSMC in First Public 4nm Win A long-awaited external name has finally landed on Intel Foundry’s dance card. On July 29, 2026, Intel and Fortinet disclosed that the next generation of Fortinet’s custom firewall silicon—the Security Processor 6—will be co-developed and manufactured by Intel on its Intel 4 process. The move makes Fortinet the first publicly named cybersecurity vendor to sign up for Intel’s foundry services, and in the process, it quietly relieves TSMC of a two-decade-long ASIC customer. For a chip that has only ever been used inside Intel’s own products, the appearance of an outside buyer represents more than a symbolic win. Intel 4, which entered high-volume manufacturing at Fab 34 in Leixlip, Ireland, back in September 2023, was the company’s first node to deploy extreme ultraviolet lithography. Until this week, its entire output went toward the compute tile in Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra processors and Granite Rapids Xeons. Kevin Xu, the CEO of Intel, had promised investors back in May that “multiple customers” were already in the pipeline. The Fortinet announcement turns that promise into a tangible contract, even if the revenue figures attached are unlikely to move the needle for a foundry business that has been bleeding more than $100 billion in annual operating losses. Two Decades of DIY Silicon Meet a New Fab Partner Fortinet’s ASIC journey stretches back over twenty years—a rarity in a networking and security industry where most competitors lean on merchant silicon or FPGAs. The previous generation, SP5, was a monolithic Arm-based SoC built on TSMC’s 7nm node. When it launched in 2023, it offered a 17x jump in firewall throughput versus standard x86 CPUs, 32x faster cryptographic operations, and an 88% reduction in power draw. With SP6, Fortinet is making its most radical architectural pivot yet. Instead of a single slab of silicon, the new processor is widely expected to adopt a chiplet-based design stitched together with Intel’s EMIB 2.5D packaging. That switch would mirror the disaggregation trend that has swept through CPUs and GPUs, allowing Fortinet to mix and match IP blocks for different throughput and cost targets. Intel says it is providing chip design, advanced packaging, and manufacturing under one roof—a bundled approach that the company has struggled to sell at scale until now. Details on performance remain under wraps. The move from TSMC’s 7nm to Intel’s 4nm-class node is not a generational leap in transistor density, so any throughput gains will likely come from the architectural redesign rather than pure process shrinks. Analysts watching the deal have described Intel 4 as “essentially a 7nm-class technology that’s already mature enough for cost-sensitive ASICs,” putting a ceiling on how much the node alone can deliver. Why Fortinet Walked Away From TSMC The switch to Intel plants a flag in U.S.-based production—what The Register succinctly called “an American chip, built in an American fab.” Supply-chain diversification has become a boardroom priority since the global disruptions that cascaded through semiconductor logistics in recent years. Ken Xie, Fortinet’s founder and CEO, framed the Intel partnership as a way to “accelerate and strengthen our ASIC strategy” by tapping Intel’s “unique combination of advanced semiconductor technology, manufacturing expertise, and global supply chain capabilities.” It’s the kind of language that chief procurement officers use when they want to stop betting their entire hardware roadmap on a single geography. Cost may also have tipped the scales. Intel’s EMIB packaging undercuts TSMC’s CoWoS by roughly 40%, according to Bernstein estimates, with EMIB coming in at “a few hundred dollars per chip” versus $900–$1,000 for a CoWoS solution on comparable AI-class processors. For a high-volume firewall ASIC that does not need the extreme interconnect density of an H100-class GPU, that savings matters. Intel has also been aggressively discounting mature nodes as it tries to backfill fab utilization. What the Community Is Saying The deal triggered an immediate 8% jump in Intel’s stock, pushing shares past $105. But the conversation on forums and trading desks quickly split into two camps. ServeTheHome’s discussion board was among the first to put the size of the win in context. One comment summarized it bluntly: “Fortinet is often a roughly 70% service, 30% hardware revenue business. That hardware is not just the security ASIC, so this does not seem like a $10B/year win for Intel’s Foundry business. Instead, this seems like winning a component of a portion of a $2B revenue stream.” Others on the same forum called out the competitive symbolism. “The standout is not just that Intel got a TSMC customer. It is also that Intel is gaining a TSMC customer in a borderline competitive product category with its x86 franchise.” The remark hints at an undercurrent of worry: if Intel can attract security-appliance silicon away from TSMC, what else might follow? Analysts were cautious. One cited by HyperFrame Research noted that “this is a single-customer commitment, not evidence of a broadening design-win pipeline,” adding that any schedule lag with Intel would pose a risk Fortinet would not face with a foundry partner that has a longer external track record. KeyBanc Capital Markets recently pegged Intel’s 18A yield at 85%, still behind TSMC’s N2 at 90% but well ahead of Samsung’s SF2 in the 50–60% range. The Fortinet deal, however, lives on an older node where yield risks are lower. On Hacker News, the muted response was itself a signal. There was no sprawling thread dissecting the deal’s architecture, just scattered comments tucked beneath mainstream coverage that highlighted the stock bump and questioned whether a mature-node win signals genuine foundry momentum or merely a one-off opportunistic partnership. A Modest Win in a Sea of Red Ink The financial context matters. Intel’s foundry division posted roughly $170 billion in revenue over the last two fiscal years but still managed to lose more than $100 billion annually. External customer revenue from foundry, assembly, and testing services was just $547 million, $159 million, and $307 million in fiscal 2023, 2024, and 2025 respectively. A chunk of that is U.S. government defense work rather than commercial silicon. Fortinet itself is not a small company—it controls 55% of the global firewall unit market by shipments and pulled in nearly $7 billion in revenue last year. But the hardware piece that flows through ASICs is a fraction of that figure. Even a successful SP6 ramp is unlikely to meaningfully dent Intel Foundry’s losses on its own. The real test will be whether Fortinet becomes a reference customer that unlocks more deals. Intel’s CEO has said the second half of 2026 should bring multiple foundry commitments, and the company has reportedly signed ten long-term server CPU supply agreements. If those materialize, the Fortinet announcement will be remembered as the first public crack in TSMC’s firewall of loyalty. If they don’t, it will be a footnote. Intel 4 vs TSMC Offerings: A Quick Comparison Node Class EUV HVM Start Transistor Density (MTr/mm²) Notes Intel 4 4nm-class Yes Sept 2023 ~160 First external customer: Fortinet TSMC N5 5nm Yes 2020 ~130 Mature, widely available TSMC N4 4nm Yes 2022 Slightly higher than N5 Refined version of N5 Intel 3 3nm Yes 2024 ~18% denser logic than Intel 4 Also open to foundry customers Note: Process comparisons across foundries are tricky and depend heavily on library choices. Intel has cautioned that direct comparisons are difficult, and independent verification data for Intel 4 remains limited. What Comes Next No production timeline has been released for the SP6. Industry convention suggests a 12- to 18-month window from deal announcement to tape-out, followed by another 6–12 months before silicon ships in volume. That would put FortiGate appliances running on SP6 somewhere in the late 2027 to 2028 range—long enough that the competitive landscape could shift. In the meantime, Fortinet continues to ride a 55% unit-share lead in firewalls while pushing into SASE, where 15% of large enterprise customers have already adopted its FortiSASE offering. The SP6 will need to power not just raw packet filtering but also the SSL inspection and AI-driven threat detection workloads that are increasingly the norm. Whether Intel’s design and packaging teams can deliver an ASIC that matches—or exceeds—what Fortinet could have achieved with TSMC’s latest nodes remains an open question that will not be answered until benchmarks hit the street.