At Computex Taipei 2026, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said on June 2 that agentic AI will boost demand for central processing units, or CPUs, as AI systems take on more multi-step work.

Intel unveiled Xeon 6 data-center processors and said its Intel 18A process technology is now at full scale for Core Ultra Series 3 PC chips already shipping in hundreds of designs.

Intel said AI agents need CPUs to coordinate tasks, retrieve information, access files, and interact with software tools alongside graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Independent research suggested CPU-side tool execution in agentic systems can account for up to 89% of end-to-end latency in some workloads.

The company described Xeon 6 as a host CPU for GPU-accelerated AI systems and smaller AI workloads.

Intel also demonstrated with Perplexity, an AI search startup, how workloads could be split between local devices and cloud servers, an approach the companies called hybrid agentic inference.

It also announced partnerships with Foxconn, Google, Ericsson, and SambaNova.

🔗 Source: Focus Taiwan

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