Intel (INTC) CEO Lip-Bu Tan said on Monday, October 12, that Chinese frontier AI models are being adopted “very fast” because their token costs are lower. Speaking at a DBS panel in Singapore, Reuters reported, he named DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM and called their performance “good enough.”
He also called himself a strong believer in open source as the best way to drive efficiency. That fits Intel’s longstanding support for open source. Cheaper tokens could encourage more inference, while Intel is positioning its CPUs for inference and agentic workloads.
Intel’s Data Center Recovery Has Accelerated
Intel’s Data Center and AI segment brought in $16.9 billion in 2025, up about 5% from $16.1 billion in 2024.
DCAI accounted for about 32% of Intel’s 2025 revenue, although changes in the segment’s composition limit comparisons with 2021. China moved the other way. Revenue there fell 18% to $12.7 billion in 2025, and its share of Intel’s total dropped from 29% to 24%.
The Bottom Line on Intel Stock
There’s a political cost too. On September 8, the NSA, CISA and FBI accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Z.AI (the labs behind all three models Tan praised) of distilling U.S. frontier models at industrial scale.
Intel’s results don’t isolate any lift from Chinese AI models, and cheaper tokens don’t by themselves mean weaker demand for Nvidia (NVDA) GPUs. The growth itself is real: second-quarter 2026 DCAI revenue reached $6.3 billion, up 59% from a year earlier. For Intel holders, the question is whether inference and agentic workloads can keep DCAI growing from that $6.3 billion base.
Want to track whether Intel’s data center business actually turns the corner? Pull up the same segment and geographic revenue charts on TIKR for free and compare them against AMD and Nvidia. Learn more here.
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