On Friday afternoon, the Wall Street Journal reported that chip giant Qualcomm has approached Intel about a possible acquisition. Although any deal was described as "far from certain," it would represent a huge drop for the company, once the world's most valuable chip company, according to unnamed sources in the newspaper. The company relies heavily on its reliance on x86 processor technology for many years. The New York Times confirmed the report Friday night, adding that "Qualcomm has not yet made a formal offer to Intel."

If the deal goes through and passes regulatory scrutiny, it would be a huge coup for Qualcomm, which re-entered the desktop processor market this year as part of Microsoft's AI PC strategy after years of dominating the mobile processor market.

Intel, meanwhile, is in arguably its weakest position in years  while many of its businesses remain profitable, the company announced major cuts, strategy changes and a more than 15 percent layoff in August after reporting a $1.6 billion loss. At the time, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the company would shut down all non-essential work and later announced it would divest its chip manufacturing business, which the company has long described as more competitive than rivals AMD and many fabled chip makers. has advantages.

Intel has also recently had to rely in part on TSMC to produce cutting-edge chips as it continues to rebuild its manufacturing capabilities (the cost of which was a major cause of Intel's recent losses). According to the reports, his own 18a formation process faced some recent problems. Although Intel's main competitor AMD also faced a difficult period and had to return, players helped AMD every step, helping AMD. 

In addition to the Nintendo Switch processor, it was made by Nvidia. Intel has also recently lost some trust among PC gamers after two generations of its flagship chips were found to be prone to strange crashes, although Intel has since agreed to extend warranties by several years and released updates that may fix the damage .

Many of Intel's problems have to do with chip management, not just production or profits  the company isn't yet a major player in AI server chips, dominated by Nvidia and not even necessarily a smaller player like AMD. Even attempts to create their own GPUs have yet to impress gamers and creators.

While Qualcomm, AMD, and Apple remain minor players in the laptop space, Intel has now twice completely changed the way it makes its flagship laptop chips in response to what it sees as battery life and integrated graphics benefits. We'll be waiting to see if its new Lunar Lake chips make it in October and beyond.