Intel Xeon Roadmap: Granite Rapids, Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids

The data center is where the turnaround of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) is showing up first. In the third quarter of 2026, Intel’s Data Center and AI segment (DCAI) brought in $7.3 billion of revenue, up 17% from the previous quarter and nearly 80% from a year earlier. Management now expects DCAI to finish the year close to $10 billion above what it expected when 2026 began. Demand is not the problem. Supply, and the roadmap that has to meet it, are. Here is that roadmap, product by product.

Granite Rapids: the Intel 3 workhorse

Granite Rapids, sold as Xeon 6, is the product paying the bills. On the third-quarter call, Lip-Bu Tan described it as Intel’s biggest source of server revenue. It is built on Intel 3, and that process is now the bottleneck. Intel has said it is still constrained on Intel 3, which is why it plans to add Intel 3 production in Oregon in the second half of 2027. Earlier in the year, Intel described Intel 3-based Xeon 6 as its fastest new product ramp in five years, and Xeon 6 was chosen as the host CPU for Nvidia’s DGX Rubin NVL8 systems.

The demand behind it is a shift that few predicted two years ago. AI inference and agent workloads need a lot of general-purpose CPU capacity around the accelerators, and hyperscalers, enterprises and the newer “neo cloud” providers are all buying. Intel has signed long-term agreements, including with Google, and an agreement with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to deploy its latest CPUs.

Clearwater Forest: the first Xeon on Intel 18A

Clearwater Forest, branded Xeon 6+, launched in the second quarter of 2026 and is Intel’s first server-class product on 18A. It is built from efficiency cores and aimed at cloud workloads that run many simple tasks in parallel. It is now shipping for revenue. Its significance goes beyond its own sales: every Clearwater Forest wafer is proof that 18A can carry a large, complex data center chip, which matters to the external foundry customers Intel is courting.

Diamond Rapids: 18A-P, 16 channels and no SMT

Diamond Rapids is the next performance Xeon and Intel’s first server product on 18A-P, the improved version of 18A that Intel is also offering to outside customers. Intel said in October that it is sampling and on track to ramp in 2027, with strong interest for inference and agentic workloads.

It is also the product where Tan’s changes are most visible. Intel cut lower-end Diamond Rapids models where, in management’s own words, it was not competitive on cost or performance, and concentrated on the 16-channel memory version. The open weakness is that Diamond Rapids lacks simultaneous multithreading (SMT), the feature that lets each core run two threads. Analysts have pressed Intel on this, because many server buyers measure value in threads per dollar, and that is where AMD has been strongest.

Coral Rapids: Intel 14A and the return of multithreading

Coral Rapids, due in 2028 on Intel 14A, is where multithreading comes back into the Intel data center roadmap. Management has said it wants to accelerate Coral Rapids where it can. It is also the first server part designed fully under the new leadership team, which is why some analysts see it as the real test of Intel’s server competitiveness.

Alongside the standard Xeon line, Intel is working with Nvidia on a custom Xeon integrated with Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect, designed to serve as the host processor in AI systems. If that works, it gives Intel a place inside Nvidia’s platform rather than outside it.

What it means for INTC

The Xeon roadmap now does two jobs at once. It has to win back server share against AMD and Arm-based chips, and it has to fill Intel’s own fabs on Intel 3, 18A, 18A-P and 14A. The near-term limit is supply, not demand: Intel is also short of substrates, the packaging material every server chip needs. The things to watch are whether the Oregon Intel 3 expansion arrives on time in 2027, whether Diamond Rapids ramps without slipping, and whether Coral Rapids can be pulled forward. For Intel stock, a server business growing this fast is the clearest evidence that the turnaround is real.

Sources: Intel Q3 2026 earnings call (October 29, 2026); Intel Q1 and Q2 2026 earnings calls; Intel management remarks at the UBS Global Technology Conference (December 2025). Blue Team analysis.