Thompson: Intel Chose Commercial Scale Over Custom Government Chips
Ben Thompson · FULL INTERVIEW: Ben Thompson on Anthropic v. DoW · Mar 2, 2026 · at 14:34
Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery, explains why historical commercial hardware dynamics enabled faster technological iteration than bespoke state procurement programs.
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“And Bob Noyce made the decision that we will sell to the government, but we're not going to design chips for the government. And the distinction there was you had guaranteed orders, which was great. The government would take your IP, and there was, and in his mind, the more important thing is there was limited volume. And the way that he foresaw correctly that this was going to be a very upfront capital-intensive process of designing, you have to design them, you have to do the equipment, all of which is in the billions of dollars today, back then it was in the tens of millions and hundreds of millions, is you need to find the largest possible market. Which was the consumer slash business market. You design for that, that will accelerate your improvement and your capabilities so much that you will end up having better devices than the government could have ever requested or made for itself.”
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