Fortinet has announced it will use Intel Foundry to manufacture its sixth-generation Security Processor (SP6), marking a notable customer win for Intel's struggling foundry business. The chip will feature dedicated accelerators for security and cryptographic operations used in Fortinet's hardware firewalls, which the company builds around custom ASICs rather than commodity x86 or Arm processors, as many rivals do. The deal is significant both for Fortinet, which gains a US-fabricated chip offering enhanced supply chain security, and for Intel, which is trying to reposition itself as a credible foundry competitor to TSMC and Samsung.

Neither company has disclosed a production timeline or performance specifications, though the SP6 is expected to improve on the SP5, which launched in 2023 with layer 7 firewalling and IPsec VPN speeds exceeding 30 Gbps. The SP6 will be built on Intel's older Intel 4 process node rather than its cutting-edge 18A technology, and may draw on disaggregated chip design and advanced packaging techniques. Intel has increasingly positioned itself as a secure, domestic manufacturing option, having previously built specialised chips for DARPA and received $3 billion from the US government in 2024 to create a secure enclave for government chip production; Washington has since taken a 9.9 percent stake in the company.