It should come as no surprise that the biggest chip companies in the world spend billions of dollars every year on research and development. To stay ahead of the competition and improve revenues, new architectures, systems, and software stacks need to be designed, built, and tested. What might raise a few eyebrows is just how much money Intel spent last year on R&D, especially compared to AMD, Nvidia, and the rest of the semiconductor world.
An analysis of research and development expenditure by TechInsights was reported by Korea JoongAng Daily, but you can get the numbers yourself by pulling up each company's 2024 financial results. For example, AMD declared that it spent $6.456 billion last year (pdf, page 1) on R&D, whereas Nvidia forked out $12.914 billion. It's worth noting that Nvidia's financial statements are numbered one year ahead of the actual period (FY 2026 is 2025 and so on).
Anyway, those figures pale in comparison to how much cash Intel burned through in 2024 to research and develop chip, fabrication technologies, software, and all kinds of tech stuff—a staggering $16.546 billion (pdf, page 25). That's 28% more than Nvidia and a frankly unbelievable 156% more than AMD.
The nearest non-US semiconductor firm is Samsung Electronics, which spent a reported $9.5 billion on R&D. That would place third, comfortably ahead of AMD, and it strongly suggests that if you have your own foundries for making chips, you need to spend a lot of cash on finding ways to make better processors.
When you compare the R&D expenditures to the amount of revenue, though, the story takes on a very different look. Intel spent 31% of its net revenue, and 26% for AMD, but Nvidia and Samsung got by on just 10% and 4%, respectively. Team Green's percentage looks very low, but only because it made so much money through its AI products.
It's interesting to see that AMD is committed to spending a healthy chunk of its income on R&D. Unlike Intel, it doesn't really have to worry about chip manufacturing and process nodes, though it will spend some cash in this area. That means the vast majority of the $6.456 billion it spent in 2024 was for making better CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators, as well as the software to support them all.
Intel's product portfolio is perhaps the largest of the US semiconductor gang, though to cut losses, it's been dropping big projects and trimming divisions left, right, and centre. Whether that means its 2025 R&D costs are significantly lower is anyone's guess right now, but I suspect that the current CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, will probably want to trim it down a fair bit.
That means by the end of 2025, there's a very good chance that Nvidia will be top of the R&D spending table, partly because it will be concerned about losing ground in the AI market to cheaper competition, and partly because it has vast amounts of cold, hard cash to do so. Intel and AMD would probably like to spend more, but can't because they're either losing money as things currently stand or because their revenue stream just won't support it.
What none of them will want to do, though, is spend less on R&D for their core products: CPUs in the case of AMD and Intel (plus Samsung, to a lesser extent) and GPUs for Nvidia. These products form the backbone of their income, and with Team Red and Green laughing all the way to the bank because of how well their Ryzen and GeForce/AI products are doing, they'll certainly keep splashing the research moolah.
As for Intel, while Arrow Lake hasn't been an absolute disaster, it was certainly a 'football fumble' and I'm sure Team Blue's bean counters will be hoping that all the cash it's spent on developing Nova Lake transpires to have been worth every cent.
