Big Tech
Jul 17, 2026
A widening chip partnership between the two companies is less about one processor than about where the world's cybersecurity hardware gets designed and built.
Every cybersecurity company talks about resilience. Fortinet and Intel are now building it into silicon.
The two companies announced this week that they will jointly develop Fortinet's sixth-generation Security Processor, known as SP6, combining Fortinet's two decades of purpose-built security-chip design with Intel's semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities. On its face, the announcement reads like a routine technology partnership. Looked at closely, it is something more consequential: a test of whether one of the world's most security-sensitive categories of hardware, the chips that inspect and secure enterprise network traffic, can be built and scaled closer to home rather than dispersed across an increasingly strained global chip supply chain.
That distinction carries more weight this year than it would have five years ago. Export controls, geopolitical tension surrounding Taiwan-based manufacturing, and a broader push in Washington to bring critical chip production onto American soil have turned semiconductor sourcing into a boardroom issue rather than a purely engineering one. Fortinet's decision to deepen its relationship with Intel, instead of simply adding another offshore foundry partner, signals that supply chain diversification has become as central to its ASIC roadmap as raw performance.
A Two-Decade Bet on Custom Silicon
Fortinet built its security business around a wager most competitors avoided: designing its own application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, rather than relying on general-purpose processors running security software. That bet dates back more than 20 years and has become one of the company's defining technical advantages, allowing its firewalls to inspect traffic at speeds that software-only competitors have struggled to match.
Ken Xie, the company's founder, chairman and chief executive, described the expanded Intel relationship as an extension of that strategy rather than a departure from it.
“Fortinet’s purpose-built ASICs have been a key differentiator for more than two decades, enabling us to deliver the security effectiveness, performance, and efficiency our customers demand,” Xie said. “This expanded relationship with Intel will leverage its unique combination of advanced semiconductor technology, manufacturing expertise, and global supply chain capabilities, helping Fortinet accelerate and strengthen our ASIC strategy, while also better supporting organizations all over the world.”
Why Intel Needed This Deal as Much as Fortinet Did
The agreement also arrives at a pivotal moment for Intel, which has spent the past year under chief executive Lip-Bu Tan trying to prove that its foundry business can win customers beyond its own product lines and the small circle of AI chip designers courted by rival manufacturers. Landing a two-decade cybersecurity partner as a design and manufacturing customer, not merely a component buyer, is the kind of diversification Intel needs to show that its packaging and process technology can compete on merit rather than on national loyalty alone.
Lip-Bu Tan said the collaboration reflects that broader strategy. “As organizations face a rapidly evolving threat landscape, security infrastructure must deliver both performance and innovation at scale,” Tan said. “This collaboration demonstrates how Intel’s semiconductor leadership and advanced design, packaging, and manufacturing capabilities can help cybersecurity leaders like Fortinet accelerate the development of critical security technologies while building a more resilient and diversified global supply chain.”
The Supply Chain Argument
Both companies framed the collaboration around resilience as much as speed. Intel's contribution goes beyond fabrication capacity. The company is bringing its ecosystem intellectual property, its expertise in disaggregated chip design, and packaging technology built for both AI-heavy and cost-sensitive applications, with the aim of producing a highly integrated processor capable of handling increasingly sophisticated security services and the performance demands of large enterprise customers.
That framing extends well beyond American borders. Cybersecurity infrastructure and semiconductor sourcing have become intertwined priorities for governments across the Gulf, where the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have each pushed to build domestic AI and chip capacity as a matter of national strategy. A cybersecurity vendor as globally deployed as Fortinet, which secures networks for roughly 70 percent of the Fortune 100 alongside government agencies worldwide, diversifying its manufacturing base is the kind of move that regional enterprise and government buyers, increasingly attentive to where their security hardware is designed and built, are likely to watch closely.
What Happens Next
Neither company described SP6 as an end point. Intel and Fortinet said they intend to explore additional collaboration across semiconductor technology, manufacturing, and the broader infrastructure underpinning future cybersecurity innovation, language suggesting SP6 functions as a proof of concept for a longer-term manufacturing relationship rather than a single engagement.
For an industry that spends much of its time discussing resilience in the abstract, that is a fairly concrete way to start building it.
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