Editor’s note: Electronics recycling will be featured in sessions at the 2026 E-Scrap: The Longevity Conference in New Orleans October 26-28.
Intel’s second quarter added a concrete data point to what has otherwise been a quarter of announcements: the company is raising 2026 capital spending to more than $20 billion, roughly $3 billion above its prior plan, and told investors that 2027 spending will go significantly higher still. This capital plan carries more weight for the end-of-life sector than the earnings beat. It points to the size of the fleet now entering production.
Most of the increase is going into tooling tied to Intel 3, 18A, and 18A-P, alongside clean room build-outs and locked-in orders for substrates and memory. The company described current industry supply conditions as among the most constrained in its history across wafers, memory and substrates, with the tightest points concentrated in servers through the back half of the year. The combination of strong bookings, constrained supply, and rising spend points to a growing installed base of servers, packaging, and related infrastructure that will eventually need retirement, redeployment, or recycling, even before any of it ships.
The data center numbers give that story scale. Intel’s Data Center and AI segment posted 59% year-over-year growth, and AI-linked revenue overall grew more than 70%. Intel said server CPU demand continues to outpace available supply, with double-digit unit growth expected through 2026 and into 2028. That demand signal spans multiple years. It does not reflect a single-quarter spike, and it sets the pace at which new hardware, and eventually end-of-life volume, enters the pipeline.
Advanced packaging adds a second layer relevant to downstream handling. Intel said customer interest in its EMIB-T packaging technology remains high, with a growing order backlog and a planned ramp into 2027; yield and reliability are reportedly hitting internal targets. Packaged, multi-die systems built this way carry more steps at disassembly and materials recovery than a single monolithic die, and that complexity will show up in ITAD workflows once these platforms begin cycling out.
On the client side, the picture is more mixed. Intel expects PC consumption to run below normal seasonal patterns in the second half of 2026, with full-year unit volume down in the low double digits, driven by rising memory prices and tight availability. That is a sharper contraction than “seasonally weaker” suggests, and it has a specific downstream consequence: buyers facing higher replacement costs tend to hold onto existing PC fleets longer, which delays the timing of asset disposition without changing the eventual volume.
The data shared by Intel eventually describes a fleet that will arrive in mixed form: some standardized enterprise servers, some accelerator-adjacent and packaging-heavy platforms, and a PC base whose replacement timing is being stretched by cost pressure. It is not being eliminated. These two segments are moving on separate timelines. Server volume is building now, on a multi-year track tied to capacity Intel is only beginning to bring online. PC volume is being delayed, not canceled, as buyers hold onto existing fleets under memory-driven cost pressure.
For industry stakeholders involved in ITAD, recycling, component trading and in the broad circularity sectors, that split argues for treating servers and PCs as two separate asset cycles rather than a single combined forecast. The near-term planning implication centers on heterogeneity, not volume. Volume is still a year or more out. Fleets combining Intel-manufactured, foundry-customer, and externally sourced components will need more flexible intake and testing processes than a single-vendor refresh cycle would require.
