Intel Corp. said today it’s expanding its long-running partnership with Google Cloud into the agentic artificial intelligence realm.

By deploying the Gemini Enterprise platform across its global workforce, the chipmaker says it will be able to accelerate workflows across its corporate, engineering, supply chain and marketing operations. It’s also going to use Google’s autonomous agents to accelerate its chip design lifecycles and boost innovation companywide.

Intel Vice President and Chief Information Officer Cindy Stoddard said the company is embarking on an ambitious “AI-powered transformation” that aims to help every one of its employees move with greater speed and agility and work more efficiently. Gemini Enterprise will be the key enabler of those efforts. “Our work with Google Cloud allows us to provide our employees with a central hub to build and deploy agents through Gemini Enterprise and scale silicon development with elastic cloud infrastructure,” she said.

The partnership will see Intel move beyond isolated AI pilot projects for the first time and make dedicated agentic coding assistance and engineering automation capabilities available to its entire organization. The plan is to use Gemini’s advanced reasoning skills to streamline development pipelines and automate many of the complex, multistep workflows currently performed manually with customized line-of-business agents trained on Intel’s unique business processes.

The chipmaker will also make Gemini available to its marketing and communications teams, so they can generate hyper-targeted content for specific audiences. According to Stoddard, the company has already been experimenting with Gemini in this area, with early pilots spanning agents that can recommend the most relevant subject matter experts for any given topic and generate executive-ready messaging.

Intel’s ambitions to scale silicon design with AI agents might be an even bigger deal. It wants to rely on Gemini to optimize its development simulations and developer workloads. By automating much of this work, Intel should be able to do a lot more of it, which is why it’s also planning to lean on Google Cloud’s infrastructure. It said the cloud company will augment its existing on-premises compute capabilities with its C4 and N4 instances so it can run multiple complex high-performance computing simulations concurrently and, in turn, dramatically speed up its chip design processes.

The announcement builds on a longstanding partnership that has seen Google and Intel collaborate on everything from AI chip interconnects to 5G networks. In April, Google said it’s going to adopt multiple future iterations of Intel Corp.’s Xeon central processing units that will be deployed on its public cloud platform to support AI and general-purpose computing workloads. As part of that arrangement, Google will also use Intel’s infrastructure processing units or IPUs, which handle infrastructure management tasks so the CPUs have more capacity to focus on actual compute.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research, told SiliconANGLE that it’s a smart move for Intel to move more chip development to Google Cloud and lean on Gemini, though he wondered if some might see it as a bit of a “barney deal” that lacks any real substance, given that it’s Intel’s Xeon processors that power Google Cloud’s C4 and N4 compute instances. “This announcement is the hidden “pro quo” of what was announced in April, but it’s all good so long as the customer wins,” he added.

Nontheless, Google Cloud Chief Product and Business Officer Karthik Narain was more insistent that the partnership will ultimately transform what enterprise AI can achieve. “Pairing Intel’s engineering expertise with Google Cloud’s agentic AI tools creates an autonomous foundation that will fundamentally accelerate how they design, operate and scale for the AI wave,” he promised.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Gemini