Intel invites its industry partners here to experiment with hardware and software configurations and hammer out reference designs that service providers and enterprises can use to equip their data centers to offer new cloud services.

For Intel, the investments in the Cloud Builders program and other, similar initiatives are designed to help the chip maker hold onto its dominant share of the cloud server market in the face of looming competition.

"Intel wants to make sure that as people build these clouds, they are using Intel processors," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with Insight 64.

This week, Intel invited reporters to tour the Portland data center, to see some of the reference architectures being demonstrated and hear from software partners who work with Intel in the cloud.

While some companies merely design products and sell them, Intel does much to shape the market into which its processors will be sold, even creating uses that the market may not have discovered yet by itself.