Intel, while pivoting to AI, tries to protect lead

Intel has long dominated the business for central processing chips

The computers in modern data centres — the engine rooms of the digital economy — are powered mainly by Intel chips. They animate the computing clouds of the internet giants and corporate data centres worldwide.

But Intel is now facing new competitive forces that could pose a challenge to its data-center dominance and profitability.

In particular, the rise of artificial intelligence is creating demand for new computing hardware tailored to handle vast amounts of unruly data and complex machine-learning software — and Intel’s general-purpose chips are not yet tuned for the most demanding tasks. Instead, specialised chips are delivering better performance on