Struggling chipmaker Intel has employed former board member and semiconductor business veteran Lip-Bu Tan as the newest in a succession of CEOs to try to show round a once-dominant firm that helped outline Silicon Valley.
Tan, 65, will take over the daunting job subsequent Tuesday, greater than three months after Intel’s earlier CEO, Pat Gelsinger, abruptly retired amid a deepening downturn that triggered huge layoffs and raised questions concerning the chipmaker’s potential to outlive as an unbiased firm.
This would possibly not be Tan’s first time operating a semiconductor firm, nor his first affiliation with Intel. He spent greater than a decade as CEO of Cadence Design Programs, which makes software program that helps designs processors, and joined Intel’s board of administrators in 2022 earlier than stepping down final August. Tan will rejoin Intel’s board along with changing into CEO.
“Lip-Bu is an distinctive chief whose expertise business experience, deep relationships throughout the product and foundry ecosystems, and confirmed monitor document of making shareholder worth is strictly what Intel wants in its subsequent CEO,” Intel’s interim Govt Chairman Frank Yeary mentioned.
Intel has been led by interim co-CEOs, David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, since Gelsinger walked away from a job that he undertook in February 2021.
Though Gelsinger arrived at Intel amid excessive hopes, his tenure was a significant letdown as Intel’s inventory worth plunged 60%, wiping out $160 billion in shareholder wealth. Main as much as his departure final 12 months, Intel laid of 17,500 of its workers — about 15% of its workforce — and suspended its dividend to economize on its approach to an annual lack of $19 billion.
Extra just lately, Intel delayed the opening of two new chip factories i n Ohio to make sure the initiatives are accomplished in a “financially accountable method.” The venture is meant to attract upon the $7.8 billion in funding earmarked for Intel within the CHIPS Incentives Program created through the administration of President Joe Biden.
It was the newest signal of misery for Intel, a Santa Clara, California, firm that helped launch Silicon Valley by creating the microprocessors that enabled the private laptop revolution underneath the management of its CEO at the moment, Andy Grove.
However as its management modified Intel missed the technological shift to cell computing triggered by Apple’s 2007 launch of the iPhone, and it is lagged extra nimble chipmakers. Intel’s troubles have been magnified for the reason that introduction of synthetic intelligence — a booming subject the place the chips made by once-smaller rival Nvidia have grow to be tech’s hottest commodity.
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