Intel is officially shelving its Falcon Shores GPU, marking another shift in the company’s tumultuous AI hardware strategy. In its Q4 2024 earnings call, Interim Co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus confirmed that the chip will not see a commercial release. Instead, Falcon Shores will serve as an internal test platform, with Intel shifting its focus toward a new AI-focused datacenter solution, codenamed Jaguar Shores.
“Many of you heard me temper expectations on Falcon Shores last month. Based on industry feedback, we plan to leverage Falcon Shores as an internal test chip only without bringing it to market. This will support our efforts to develop a system-level solution at rack scale with Jaguar Shores to address the AI data center. More broadly, as I think about our AI opportunity, my focus is on the problems our customers are trying to solve, most notably, to lower the cost and increase the efficiency of compute.”
— Intel’s Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Q4 2024 Earnings (
While Intel struggles to find its footing, competitors have surged ahead. NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper and Grace Blackwell platforms have dominated AI training and inference, while AMD’s MI300X, MI300C, and MI300A chips have bolstered the company’s HPC credibility. AMD currently powers the El Capitan and Frontier supercomputers, which occupy the top two slots on the TOP500 list. Meanwhile, the Intel-powered Aurora supercomputer—built on a stack of Ponte Vecchio GPUs—fell short of its original performance projections and was overshadowed by Frontier before it even came online. (It’s still the third-fastest in the world, though.)