Chip manufacturer Intel is providing its Atom chip technology to a startup run by a former associate of CEO Lip-Bu Tan, says a report from Reuters. Tan, along with having significant experience in the semiconductor industry, is also a well-known venture capital investor. The startup, called Rosaic, is run by Amarjit Gill, who invested with Tan in high-performance chip startup Nuvia and worked together in establishing RISC-V chip company Rivos.

Intel's Atom chips are designed to cater to low-power use needs. They primarily compete with British design house Arm's products and were at one time targeted towards running the Android operating system in partnership with Google. The latest Atom chips were announced in the first quarter of this year, after the firm upgraded the P-Series lineup of the chips.

These chips are designed to address server and networking use cases, and their refresh came after Intel announced two new Atom X Series chips in the third quarter of 2025.

Now, a report from Reuters suggests that Intel has shared the underlying technology for the Atom processors with a startup run by CEO Lip-Bu Tan's former associate. Tan joined Intel in 2025 and is currently spearheading a turnaround at the firm targeted towards the AI industry and its foundry business.

According to the details, Intel will transfer the register-transfer level (RTL) code for the Atom processors to Rosaic. Rosaic is run by Amarjit Gill, who worked with Tan in his venture capital and chip company initiatives. RTL describes how input data from the hardware is transferred to the output from the registers on a CPU. Reuters quotes a chip executive to claim that the code sharing will allow Rosaic to gain deep exposure to Intel's intellectual property and enable it to build custom chips as well.

Intel and AMD are the world's largest designers and sellers of chips designed through the x86 microarchitecture. China's Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor Co., Ltd. and Hygon Information Technology are two firms that cater to the country's domestic needs for personal computing chips.

The rise in the demand for AI computing chips has led to a higher interest in GPUs for high-performance computing, and Intel, under Tan, is seeking to make a comeback by utilizing the requirement of agentic AI computing for traditional CPUs.

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