Intel intends to ship a new artificial intelligence accelerator by the end of 2026. The chip, known as Crescent Island, relies on far less expensive memory and simpler cooling than the high-end offerings from Nvidia and AMD. Executives at the company describe the move as a pragmatic reset after years of missteps in the AI hardware race. Kevork Kechichian leads Intel’s data center group. He joined from Arm last year. In comments to the Financial Times , Kechichian said the company is “starting with the basics” to rebuild its position. Past efforts faltered. The Gaudi series of AI chips posted weak sales. Its planned successor, Falcon Shores, was canceled. So Intel shifted focus. Crescent Island targets inference. That is the phase where trained models answer user queries. Training large models remains Nvidia’s stronghold. And the design choices reflect hard lessons. Nvidia’s Blackwell chips and AMD’s competing accelerators depend on high-bandwidth memory, or HBM.…