“I will transform Intel into an engineer-centric corporation.” “Bureaucracy stifles innovation. We will move like a startup on the first day of its founding.”
Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武·65), the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Intel, a leading semiconductor corporation in the United States with more than 100,000 employees, made these comments on March 31 (local time) during the 'Intel Vision 2025' event in Las Vegas, Nevada. Appointed CEO of Intel on March 12, Tan made his first public appearance that day. He was noted for promoting Intel's revival, but his first public speech as a savior after Pat Gelsinger left the CEO position due to deteriorating performance in December 2024 drew significant attention.
After being appointed as Intel's CEO, he met with various customers and noted, “I realized that Intel is far from meeting customer expectations.” He stated, “We have fallen behind in innovation. We have been too slow to adapt to changes and meet customer demands. We have lost many talents.”
Tan stated his intention to change Intel. He noted, “I have seen many cases where small, focused teams innovate quickly and acquire existing businesses,” and added, “I will eliminate bureaucracy at Intel.” He also mentioned, “I will empower engineers more, and I will spend my weekends with engineers. I will give engineers the freedom to innovate within Intel.” Tan further said, “I will bring the best talents in the industry back to Intel or attract new ones.”
Leading tech and finance, Intel aims for revival
Tan is a semiconductor expert who served as CEO of Cadence Design Systems from 2008 to 2021. Born in Malaysia in 1959, he majored in physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He later earned a master's degree in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1981. Following the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, he felt a sense of crisis as a nuclear engineer and received an MBA from the University of San Francisco in 1983. In 1984, he founded Walden International, a venture capital firm, and conducted hundreds of investments and initial public offerings (IPOs), as well as mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Due to this experience, Tan is regarded as a CEO well-versed in both technology and finance, two significant contexts for managing technology corporations.
Tan was recruited to Intel's board by former CEO Gelsinger in 2022 during his tenure at Cadence Design Systems. At that time, he was tasked with the mission of rebuilding the foundry (contract semiconductor manufacturing) announced by Intel in 2021, following its withdrawal from the market in 2018. However, he faced conflicts with the board over artificial intelligence (AI) strategies and resigned from the board in August 2024. Subsequently, he stepped in as Intel's savior after Gelsinger resigned due to the company's management failures.
Former CEO Gelsinger took office as Intel CEO in 2021, launching a massive investment alongside the declaration of re-entering the foundry. He began by investing $20 billion (about 29.4 trillion won) in a factory in Ohio, USA, aimed at 18A (1.8nm-grade semiconductors; 1nm equals one billionth of a meter), pouring a total of $25 billion (about 35 trillion won) into the foundry sector. However, Intel's foundry business posted a loss of $9 billion (about 13.2 trillion won) in 2023 and incurred an additional loss of $5.3 billion (about 7.8 trillion won) in the first half of 2024.
As a result, there is speculation that the world's number one foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), may acquire some equity in Intel's foundry operations to run them in cooperation with the U.S. companies Nvidia and AMD. In the core field of system semiconductor design, Intel has also lost market leadership to Nvidia in developing AI chips.
Intel's stagnation attributed to foundry and AI: 'Breakthrough through technology'
Tan stated during the event that there will be no sale of the foundry and that he will manage the foundry division with the same priority as the existing product divisions. He remarked, “I will strive to learn from past mistakes and create a competitive system,” adding, “There is a growing global demand for chip production, and we need flexible, resilient, and secure supply chains.” Tan also noted, “All foundry customers have unique design methodologies,” asserting, “Customers have preferred design asset (IP) suppliers and EDA partners, and we will optimize the performance and yield they need.”
Tan further stated, “Improving yield, quality, and services in the foundry business takes time, but I prefer to build a successful model in the long run,” adding, “Intel plays a vital role as the only U.S. company that designs and manufactures advanced chips. I am pleased that the Trump administration is working to strengthen the U.S.'s technological and manufacturing leadership.”
Intel plans to mass-produce the next-generation graphics processing unit (GPU) Panther Lake using the 18A process in the second half of 2025. This process is ahead of the 2nm technology that TSMC and Samsung Electronics are targeting, and its success is expected to determine Intel's foundry revival.
Tan acknowledged that Intel has fallen behind in innovation in the AI sector and is too slow. In September 2024, Intel launched the AI accelerator Gaudi 3, but the AI market is already dominated by Nvidia, making it challenging to expand its market share. Tan stated, “In the past, we designed hardware first and then developed software to make it work, but the world has changed.” He added, “We will start with the problems we want to solve and the workloads we need to process, and we should have a software-first mindset.” He further indicated, “We will accelerate the development of new computing architecture platforms using AI-based system designs,” mentioning that “the new platform will play a crucial role in developing custom semiconductors tailored for specific applications.”
Tan also announced plans to spin off non-core assets to focus on the foundry and AI chip sectors. This means reducing unnecessary business operations to cut expenses and investing the resources obtained through this process into the foundry and AI chips. Earlier, in March 2024, Intel announced it would spin off Altera, a programming semiconductor (FPGA) company it acquired in 2015.
Plus Point
Chinese executives lead four major semiconductor corporations in the U.S.
With the U.S. and China competing for dominance in technical fields, including AI and quantum computing, it is noteworthy that all leaders of the four major semiconductor corporations in the U.S. are of Chinese descent.
Lip-Bu Tan, the Intel CEO born to a Chinese Malaysian family, is not the only notable figure; Jensen Huang (黃仁勳·62), the leader of AI chip frontrunner Nvidia, is also an American of Taiwanese descent. After obtaining a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Jensen Huang founded Nvidia in 1993, recognizing the potential in the field of computer graphics.
Lisa Su (蘇姿豐豐·56), CEO of AMD, which competes with Intel in server central processing units (CPUs) and Nvidia in AI chips, is also of Taiwanese descent. Su moved to the U.S. with her family at the age of three, graduated from MIT, joined AMD in 2012, and has been in the CEO position since 2014 for over a decade.
Hock Tan (陳福陽·72), CEO of Broadcom, which is considered a powerhouse in wireless and wired communication chips, is also a Chinese American born in Malaysia, like Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel. Broadcom recently ventured into custom AI chip development, and as of March 7, had a market capitalization exceeding $1 trillion (about 1,470 trillion won).
Recently, 'China power' has been significant in the field of AI research. Fei-Fei Li (李飞飞飛飛·49), known as the mother of deep learning, founded the AI startup WorldLab, which currently has a corporate value of $1 billion (about 1.47 trillion won). Andrew Ng (吳恩達·49), a prominent scholar in AI, has parents of Chinese descent from Hong Kong, while video generation AI firm PicLab was founded by Guo Wenjing (郭文景·30), a Chinese individual from Stanford's AI research institute.
Eric Yuan (袁征·55), founder of the video conferencing service Zoom, one of the co-founders of YouTube Steve Chen, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang (楊致遠·57) are also of Chinese descent.