Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, July 25th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Could Intel exit the high-end chip game entirely? Why are public companies loading up on crypto?

GPD-5 is probably coming in a matter of weeks. What if it's actually AI job apocalypse not now? And in the long reads,

the best explainer of those GLP1 drugs I've read so far. Here's what you miss today in the world of

tech.

Intel announced earnings that were okayish, I guess, but the big news was the continued restructuring

as the company struggles to survive. For example, Intel canceled planned fab projects in Germany and

Poland and says it will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia.

Quoting CNBC, CEO Lip BhutanTan added that the company would slow down

the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand

and if it can secure big customers for the facility. Over the past several years, the company

invested too much too soon without adequate demand, Tan wrote. In the process, our factory footprint

became needlessly fragmented and underutilized. Tan wrote that the company's forthcoming chip

manufacturing process called 14A will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.

There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense, Tan wrote, end quote. More on that from

Reuters, quote. Those customers for the company's so-called 14A manufacturing process are crucial to the

success of the technology, so much so that if it fails to secure a big one, it could have shut down

its cutting-edge manufacturing business altogether, according to Intel's

quarterly filing on Thursday. The possibility that Intel could drop out of the cutting-edge

manufacturing business would be a historic shift for a company that has described itself as a

steward of Moore's law, an observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore about the fast rate

of development of the chip industry that held true for decades.

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