When Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO of Intel in 2021, the company had “lost its way,” he says. For Gelsinger, who was returning to the chipmaker where he’d once been CTO, the plan was to invest and rebuild.
Part of the business is the Programmable Solutions Group, which is a business you’re looking to spin off. Talk to us about what that means and how that fits into the strategy. This has been a huge agenda in my period as CEO. The world needs balanced and resilient supply chains. And with that it’s pretty straightforward. We can’t have one port, as we saw in the Covid crisis, and the world stops. We can’t have one island where we’re dependent. I have major construction projects under way today: Ireland, Israel, Poland, Germany and the build-out in the U.S. with our Chips Act proposals in Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico and Ohio, and in Malaysia and Vietnam.
That said, there are concerns, and I say hey, we want to maximize exports every day of the week including China, half of the semiconductor market of the world. We want to be very thoughtful about how technologies flow and we need to be finally aligned with our allies. To me those three parts: manage the technologies, align with our allies, but maximize our export is the right long-term policy for how we treat China and this part of the world. As we look at it today, this is precarious.
We get to play two ways. One is, I have my generative AI chips, and we said, build AI into everything, build it into the PCs, build it into the edge computer so that when you walk into the manufacturing or the distribution, it’s doing facial recognition or being able to do security monitoring. Every application and every enterprise data center mining that data will become AI-efied. So we have components that will fit into every one of those different application areas.