Intel has announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired, effective December 1, and stepped down from the company’s board of directors.
Intel execs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus have been named interim co-CEOs. Zinsner is Intel’s CFO, and Holthaus, GM of Intel’s client computing group, has been appointed to the newly created position of CEO of Intel Products, a division spanning the chipmaker’s client computing group as well as its data center, AI, network, and edge businesses.
Frank Yeary, independent chair of the board of Intel, will become interim executive chair during the period of transition. Intel says that the leadership structure at Intel Foundry, its chip design and manufacturing org, remains unchanged, and that the Intel board has formed a search committee to find a permanent successor to Gelsinger.
“Leading Intel has been the honor of my lifetime — this group of people is among the best and the brightest in the business, and I’m honored to call each and every one a colleague,” Gelsinger said in a statement. “Today is, of course, bittersweet as this company has been my life for the bulk of my working career. I can look back with pride at all that we have accomplished together. It has been a challenging year for all of us as we have made tough but necessary decisions to position Intel for the current market dynamics. I am forever grateful for the many colleagues around the world who I have worked with as part of the Intel family.”
Gelsinger first joined Intel as an 18-year-old after earning an associate’s degree from Lincoln Tech. He was the lead architect of Intel’s 4th generation 80486 processor, introduced in 1989. And at age 32, he was named the youngest VP in Intel’s history.
Gelsinger became Intel’s CTO in 2001, leading key tech developments including Wi-Fi, USB, and the Intel Core and Intel Xeon processors lines. In 2009, he left to join EMC as president and CFO, becoming the CEO of VMware in 2012.
Gelsinger rejoined Intel as CEO as the company found itself under pressure from activist investors to reorganize. He launched an ambitious five-year course correction, greenlighting the construction of massive, multi-billion-dollar new chip manufacturing plants in the U.S. and overseas and stating ambitious for Intel to catch up to Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC and Korean chip manufacturer Samsung by the end of the decade.
Gelsinger also pushed Congress to subsidize stateside chip manufacturing. In November, the U.S. Commerce Department awarded Intel up to $7.86 billion through a funding bill, the CHIPs Act, to advance Intel’s commercial semiconductor manufacturing in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon.
But Gelsinger often stumbled — and struggled to deliver on his promises.
Gelsinger reportedly offended TSMC by calling out Taiwan’s precarious relations with China, which led to Intel losing out on discounts from the chip manufacturer. He was overly optimistic about the ability of Intel’s AI chips, like Gaudi, to compete against products from competitors like Nvidia. And his efforts to transform Intel into a chip fabricator for other companies ran into technical problems.
By early 2022, Intel’s revenue from personal computer chips dropped 25% in the second quarter of 2022, and it lost chip sales in data centers to rival AMD. A deal to supply chips to Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car division, fell through. (A few years later, Intel would lose out on another major potential customer, Sony, after failing to come to a chip manufacturing agreement for the company’s next PlayStation console.) And Gelsinger announced cuts — and cut his salary.
Intel’s 18A manufacturing process for chips — meant to deliver major new business to the company — became a liability after it failed to meet reliability expectations. Apple and Qualcomm have passed on 18A for technical reasons, and Intel isn’t expected to begin producing chips with 18A in high volume until 2026.
In early fall, Intel took steps to transition Intel Foundry to an independent subsidiary — a move shareholders have long pushed for — as it announced a few customer wins, including with AWS (which plans to use its 18A process) and the Pentagon.
Intel’s revenue shrunk to $54 billion in 2023, down around a third from the year Gelsinger took over. The company has vowed to restructure and cut more than 15,000 jobs in a $10 billion cost-reduction plan, and paused or delayed construction on several chipmaking facilities.
Analysts expect Intel to lose $3.68 billion this year, its first annual net loss since 1986. The chipmaker has reportedly considered selling its autonomous driving arm Mobileye and its enterprise networking division, and suitors including Qualcomm have reportedly approached the company about a takeover.
