Intel looks at artificial intelligence as great potential offering growth and worthwhile opportunities for its standalone programmable chip unit, according to its CEO Sandra Rivera.

Staring out as a standalone business at the dawn of the year, the company revealed plans for its future and christened the unit as Altera this week.

From two to three years forward, the parent company intends to hold a stock offering for Altera.

The programmable chips manufactured under Altera are capable for support AI applications and computing tasks that come with the purpose built custom processors developed by Amazon.com and the general use AI chips from Nvidia.

These programmable chips are expected to cater to a specialized market and the hardware to power it is in flux at present.

"(Programmable chips are) always at the forefront of that innovation cycle and that's our job to stay at the forefront," Rivera said. "To make it easy to drive these transitions."

The CEO lined out the statistics for the programmable chips market which is apparently $ 8 to $ 10 billion for last year.

Yet the opportunity for these programmable chips in the market is still not known due to non-existence of good third-party data.

"I think it's larger than people realize," she said, and added that's because there are many programmable chips helping at various stages of the "AI workflow."
Currently, the Agilex series, which are also programmable chips, are produced by the company’s contract manufacturing arm named Intel Foundry.

This thursday, Intel’s shares rose by 1.8 percent in mid-day trading and its peers AMD (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA) rose 6.5 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively.

The field programmable gate array was expected to grow at roughly 9% per year from roughly $8B in 2023 to approximately $11.5B by 2027, Intel said at the time of the separation announcement, citing third-party estimates.