Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks during the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Bellevue, Washington, on Nov. 29, 2017.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Intel dropped as much as 6% on Friday afternoon following a Bloomberg report that Microsoft plans to design its own chips for its Surface PCs as well as servers.
Intel has famously had a long-running partnership with Microsoft as the primary processor maker for Windows PCs.
The report comes a month after Apple started selling PCs using its own M1 processor, instead of Intel chips.
The chips are reportedly based on technology from Arm, which Nvidia is in the process of acquiring from Softbank. Apple’s chips for its iPhones and Amazon‘s server chips are also based on Arm’s instruction set.
“Apple’s move was a certainly very interesting one. We are studying it,” Judson Althoff, executive vice president of worldwide commercial business at Microsoft, said during an appearance at the UBS Global, Technology, Media and Telecommunications conference on December 8.
Microsoft said in 2017 that it was working with Arm server makers to optimize silicon for use in its own data centers. Windows currently runs on Arm-based PCs, usually with chips made by Qualcomm.
Representatives for Intel and Microsoft didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
This story is under development; check back for updates.
