It’s been less a month since Lip-Bu Tan took over as chief executive officer (CEO) at Intel and he might already be making some major moves.
It’s been less a month since Lip-Bu Tan took over as chief executive officer (CEO) at Intel and he might already be making some major moves. None bigger than a reported chipmaking deal with rival TSMC that would see the two chip behemoths form a joint venture. If true—and Tan did promise to focus on winning through engineering—it could signal the beginning of a tectonic shift in the status quo.Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right? To be fair, Intel and TSMC are not enemies, though they also don’t always see eye-to-eye. When former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger retired from the company last December, TSMC founder Morris Chang (retired as CEO in 2005 and as chairman of the board in 2018) made a comment suggesting he should have steered the company more towards AI than its foundry model.
«I don’t know why Pat resigned. I don’t know if his strategy was bad or if he didn’t execute it well.Compared with AI, he seemed to focus more on becoming a foundry. Of course now it seems that [Gelsinger] should have focused on AI», Chang said during an event to launch his autobiography. «They currently have neither a new strategy nor a new CEO. Finding both is very difficult.»It took a few months, but Intel did find its next CEO in Tan, and his strategy as revealed in an open letter to stockholders is to complete Intel’s turnaround in part by facilitating a stronger foundry model.
