There’s a fascinating new rumor involving Nintendo and, of all companies, Intel.
What’s Happening With Intel
This rumor has come about because of some big news in the tech industry. Softbank, a Japanese financial company, recently invested $ 2 billion into ailing tech company Intel.
That’s money that Intel will need to rebuild from the mistakes it’s made in the last five years. Softbank will own 2 % of Intel. While it’s not a controlling stake, it immediately makes Softbank an important investor for the company.
Softbank Makes Some Huge Claims
Reddit found Softbank mentioning Nintendo in their recent Extraordinary Report/Rinji Hokokusho. This is a mandatory report based on Japanese business rules and laws. Japanese companies make these reports whenever they make big investments to their investors.
Softbank said this in their report (as translated by Google):
Through this strategic investment, our domestic portfolio companies and partners (e.g., NTT Docomo, Inc., Fujitsu Limited, and Nintendo Co., Ltd.) will be able to leverage Intel Corporation’s U.S. manufacturing capabilities and gain access to cutting-edge ARM nodes.
This will enable us to ensure the resilience of our partner companies’ supply chains, promote domestic production, and strengthen our long-term collaboration with the US industry.
We know there could be issues in machine translation. But this seems to line up with Redditor Logical-Delivery-574’s summary:
Loosely translated it says that Softbank is expecting to benefit from using Intel as they have a current investment portfolio of companies that will be able to use US manufacturing, including Nintendo.
This Rumor Has Come Up Before
Last April, KeyBanc business analyst John Vinh also claimed that Intel would become a Nintendo supplier. In his words:
We believe INTC [Intel] has won the GPU gaming socket for the Nintendo Switch 3 on 18A.
At the time, it seemed so incredible that it was pretty easy to dismiss. Was Nintendo really thinking that far ahead to make contracts for the Switch 3 already? And what could Nintendo get from Intel?
How Nintendo Could Work With Intel
While Intel is still most famous for making Windows gaming CPUs, their business is far broader than that today. They recently entered the foundry business, so that they could assemble their CPUs and computer chips themselves.
It’s definitely possible Nintendo made this deal with Intel. And Nintendo’s other partner Nvidia could be in on it too. Nvidia could have Intel make their Nintendo SOCs in Intel’s foundries.
Softbank heavily implies Nintendo is interested to get some of their manufacturing in America. With the prevailing business conditions in the US, Nintendo might really need to do this to stay successful.
But having two rumors line up does not confirm a rumor is correct. We’ll have to see if Intel or Nintendo confirms it in the future.
