>They have been talking about being a foundary for external use for a while, years

Correct, Gelsinger announced roughly a month after returning to Intel their new strategy (~2 years ago). Believe it or not, pulling apart the financials of a company the size of Intel can't be done overnight - and I would guess legally they needed some customer contracts built on the old process technology before they could depreciate assets.

>yet i have not heard of a single customer yet, just an announcement today that intel and ericsson have a partnership.

Did you spend any time looking? 30 seconds on google shows Mediatek signed up last year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2022/08/10/inte...

Yep, i feel like i am just a bit skeptical. I would have just liked to see multiple chips out in the wild (from different companies outside of intel) using the intel fabs.

This smells of mark to market accounting aka Enron book cooking

The CEO allegedly wants them to be an external foundry. His direct reports may not be as enthusiastic.

Arm has announced a partnership with Intel Foundry Services: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...

IBM also.

ARM isn't a customer though. It's IP that Intel's potential customers can use.

The A18 node will be the first node that IFS will deliver to external customers. That node was recently pulled in and is scheduled now for H2 2024. What you heard so far, like from Ericsson, are design wins. Presumably Intel is working with many more customers that we don’t know about yet.

Disclaimer: long Intel, recently increased my position.

The article said that foundry did about a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue

That's what, ~5k wafers a month?

Well they only announced that they would be doing this two years ago. You can’t set that up overnight, when your fabs are intimately intertwined with the rest of your operations and you need both to separate proprietary IP and document processes (and set up the ability to work closely with external customers).

A financial quarter of $250MM a couple of years after that is pretty fast.

They had been doing this before that point. Altera had been on Intel's foundry service since 2013.

5k wafers after ten years of foundry service is pretty abysmal.