The two companies announced a strategic collaboration to build the Fortinet Security Processor 6, the custom silicon inside its FortiGate firewalls. Intel will handle the chip design, advanced packaging, and manufacturing.
The first name on the list
That last part matters more than the chip itself. Intel told Tom’s Hardware it will build the SP6 on Intel 4. That is a process the company has so far reserved for its own products, so Fortinet is the first outside customer named for the node.
It is also the first corporate foundry customer Intel has been willing to name since Tan took over in March 2025, as CNBC reported. Tan told investors in May that “multiple customers” were already working with the foundry. His policy, he added, was not to name them.
Why Intel needed this
The backdrop is a company trying to convince the market it can rival TSMC. Intel said in an April filing that it was still chasing a “significant” customer for its most advanced 18A and 14A processes, the ones that justify the vast cost of its new fabs. So far, the foundry’s biggest confirmed customer is Intel itself, plus the US government.
The deal would “accelerate and strengthen our ASIC strategy,” said Fortinet’s founder and chief executive Ken Xie. The firm has designed its own chips for two decades, a rare move in an industry that mostly buys processors off the shelf.
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A TSMC customer, poached
For Fortinet, the draw is supply-chain security: an American chip, built in an American fab, as The Register put it. The company ranked first in firewall appliances shipped in early 2023, with a 48% unit share.
There is a sharper angle too. TSMC made the previous chip, the SP5, so Intel is poaching a rival’s customer, as ServeTheHome noted. The SP6 will likely be a chiplet design, a break from the single-block SP5 of 2023. It is part of a wider rush by tech firms to build their own custom silicon.
The catch
Read the fine print and the win shrinks. Intel 4 is older technology, not the leading-edge node Intel most needs to sell. There is no production date and no specs, and the firewall maker will not be a marquee buyer either. Intel would say only that details would come later.
The revenue is modest, too. ServeTheHome reckons the deal is a slice of a roughly $2 billion hardware business, not the $10-billion-a-year anchor Intel is chasing. Fortinet was previously part of Intel’s Xeon supply chain, so the relationship is not new.
What it signals
Still, a named customer is a named customer. It lands two days before Intel reports quarterly earnings, with the stock already up sharply on the year. Whether it signals more rests on the one thing Intel still has not announced: a big buyer for its best chips.
