Price hike? Intel 13th/14th Gen Core processors are running low on global stock

IT House, March 14 — In an interview with CRN, Intel’s Global Channel Director Dave Guzzi issued a warning that consumer and enterprise CPUs are experiencing a widespread shortage, and product prices are likely to rise inevitably.

IT House cites a blog post stating that Guzzi pointed out this crisis has affected all industry partners, including cloud service providers (CSPs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and system integrators. The CPU market is about to see price increases, but the extent of the rise will not be as extreme as the previous memory (DRAM) crisis.

Intel’s Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner also admitted during the earnings call that the company currently cannot meet the surging demand from hyperscale cloud providers.

Regarding cloud service providers, as the rapid adoption of Agentic AI applications continues, hyperscale CSPs are shifting workloads to pure CPU architectures.

Under this trend, compared to the latest generation products, CSP customers prefer to choose more “reliable” mature products, leading to an unusually aggressive demand for older Xeon series processors like Sapphire Rapids.

In the consumer market, influenced by the current PC industry environment, consumers are rushing to buy older generation Raptor Lake CPUs (referring to the 13th and 14th generation Core desktop/mobile processors) to lock in supplies early.

The report states that because older Xeon and Raptor Lake processors heavily rely on the mature “Intel 7” process node, Intel now faces a tough choice between expanding mature node capacity and advancing new nodes like Intel 3 or 18A.

Originally, the company hoped that enterprise customers would quickly transition to CPUs based on new processes, but market obsession with older products has disrupted this capacity expansion plan, leading to old production lines operating at full capacity.