Intel Can't Make Its Cheap Laptop Chips Fast Enough

Intel has a good problem on its hands: it can't keep up with demand for its own chip.

On the company's latest earnings call, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said demand for Intel's budget-focused Wildcat Lake processor "is outstripping supply." CFO David Zinsner went further, confirming the chips are sold out entirely. "We've seen significant growth in Wildcat Lake," Zinsner said. "It's coming exactly at the right time because it's cost-optimized and we're seeing a lot of focus in that regard."

Wildcat Lake is Intel's answer to the budget end of the Windows laptop market, and it's already showing up in machines positioned against Apple's MacBook Air, including the new Dell XPS 13 and the HP Omnibook 5 14. These laptops hit low starting prices, but often by pairing the chip with just 8GB of RAM, an amount that can leave Windows machines feeling strained under everyday multitasking.

That RAM tradeoff isn't an accident of design. It's a symptom of a broader memory shortage that's been pushing PC prices up across the industry for months, driven in large part by AI companies buying up memory chips at a pace manufacturers can't match. And according to Intel, there's no relief coming soon.

Asked directly about memory supply, Zinsner didn't sugarcoat it. "Make no mistake, we are not optimistic about next year in terms of memory," he said. He added that Intel expects the crunch to persist through 2027, with any potential improvement pushed out to 2028 at the earliest: "We'll, you know, have to see in '28 whether things improve, but our expectation is that it does not improve in '27."

Even that grim outlook is comparatively upbeat. Memory maker SK Hynix has projected the shortage could stretch all the way to 2030, meaning Intel's two-year horizon is actually the more hopeful of the two forecasts currently on the table.

Tan framed the moment in sweeping terms, describing it as one of the most significant supply shortages the industry has faced, tying the squeeze directly to surging demand for AI infrastructure. Zinsner, despite the bleak memory outlook, struck a notably optimistic note about PCs overall, telling the call: "We do think the PC is going to go through a renaissance despite this."

The two data points sitting side by side tell the real story here. Intel's cheapest, most supply-constrained laptop chip is flying off the shelves precisely because shoppers are hunting for affordable machines in a market where component costs keep climbing. But the very shortage fueling that demand is also the thing capping how many of those laptops Intel and its partners can actually build, and how much memory they can afford to put inside them. For now, that tension looks less like a short-term bottleneck and more like the operating condition the PC industry will be living with for the next couple of years.