Intel's new Panther Lake CPUs powered by new in-house Intel 18A process node on American soil

Intel's new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" CPUs were unveiled at CES 2026 today, the first AI PC processors fabbed on its new in-house Intel 18A process node, designed and manufactured on American soil.

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The new Panther Lake CPUs are a big moment for Intel in many ways, with one of the major ones being that Intel Foundry fabbed the new Core Ultra Series 3 processors on US soil, a big win for the semiconductor arm of Intel against TSMC. The new Intel 18A process is the most advanced semiconductor process ever developed and manufactured in the United States.

The compute die, which houses the CPU and NPU, is fabbed on Intel 18A, but the IO and GPU aren't -- they're either fabbed on TSMC or possibly on the Intel 3 process node (especially for lower-tier SKUs). This detail was released through leaks in October 2025, but now Panther Lake is (nearly) officially here.

You can read some more details about Intel Foundry and its semiconductor journey from a few major stories from the last few months in the stories below.

• Read more: Intel's new Fab 52 is fully operational, making advanced 18A chips on American soil
• Read more: Intel USAI initiative: commitment to US manufacturing + AI agents for US military

As for the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" CPUs, they'll rock up to 16 CPU cores and 12 Xe3 GPU cores, with enough gaming performance to rival AMD's popular Strix Point APU, and Qualcomm's recent Snapdragon X Elite processor. There's a lot more on those stories below:

• Read more: Intel Arc B390 GPU on Panther Lake CPUs: beats AMD and Qualcomm GPUs in gaming
• Read more: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs launched at CES 2026, Panther Lake powers next-gen laptops