Intel plans on shipping 100 million CPUs for next-gen AI PCs by 2025

Intel has had some big announcements at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, this week: the company has just said it plans on shipping 100 million AI PCs in 2025.

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That makes sense, considering we're expecting to see 40 million AI PCs shipped this year and then 60 million expected by analysts in 2025. Intel is getting behind hardware partners and software developers to make the future of AI PCs happen, with its tight relationship with Microsoft helping along the way with the integration of Copilot into Windows 11 and the next-gen Windows OS coming this year.

Intel VP David Feng told Nikkei Asia: "We are in the business of selling performance [of chips], selling the performance of CPU and GPU, and the whole package of chipsets. Now we are truly in the business of selling experiences. ... I am describing something that can only be brought to life by software, so there is an increasing need for having collaborations with application developers".

Just a few weeks ago, we had analyst Jon Peddie Research reporting that AMD and Intel shipped 66 million CPUs in Q4 2023, with Peddie noting that the CPU industry has fully recovered from recession and that AMD and Intel are booming again. Not every one of these processors has a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI workloads, but more and more of them will this year, especially as next-gen CPUs from both AMD and Intel are coming this year.

Intel is one of the biggest backers and pushers of the AI PC industry, as its just-released Meteor Lake CPUs inside of laptops feature an NPU which is optimized for AI workloads. It's super limited to things like blurring the background of video calls for now, but this will change (quite rapidly) in the coming months and years.

Microsoft and Intel (as well as AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and every other tech company) plan on making your AI PC capable of doing lots more things using AI chips on your CPUs and SoCs in the future. Intel's David Feng told Nikkei Asia that the two companies are working together on trying to "define" the value of having an AI PC.

Microsoft has its dedicated Copilot key and Copilot AI "chatbot" built into Windows right now, where it'll be an even bigger deal in the months to come with big updates coming to Windows 11.