Chipzilla doesn’t need 28nm product, so maybe this is about landing another outsourced packaging partner

Intel will explore manufacturing some chips in India’s first fab after forming an alliance with Indian mega-corp Tata.

The two companies announced the alliance yesterday.

As is often the case with these things, the language used was vague and included no firm commitments. The notable elements of the alliance are:

• A plan “to explore manufacturing and packaging of Intel products for local markets at Tata Electronics’ upcoming Fab and OSAT (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test) facilities, as well as a collaboration for advanced packaging in India.”
• A collaboration “focused on consumer and enterprise hardware enablement, and semiconductor and systems manufacturing to support India’s domestic semiconductor ecosystem.”
• The intention to “explore the opportunity to rapidly scale tailored AI PC solutions for consumer and enterprise markets in India” by using AI compute reference designs cooked up by Intel.

It’s hard to see how Tata’s first fab matters to ...