Athira Sethu
Kochi, 3 December 2024
Intel on Monday announced that the Chief Executive Officer, Pat Gelsinger, had stepped down after facing challenges during his tenure at the company.
Gelsinger returned to Intel in 2021 after serving as CEO of VMware and was expected to transform the company. During his tenure, Intel’s stock dropped by 61%, and the company could not cope with increasing competition in the technology industry.
Under Gelsinger, many issues afflicted Intel, from production delays to losing some of its top talent, and its inability to quickly adapt to the increasing need for AI-powered technologies. Once dominant in the computer chip market, Intel was not prepared for the shift from mobile computing to AI, and hence has fallen further behind with the smaller company, Nvidia, which invested greatly in the AI chip.
In August, Intel announced that it would lay off 15% of its employees to help the company cut costs by $10 billion. It was, however still going downhill with the stock. What once was a smaller competitor for Intel, Nvidia is now at a value of $3.4 trillion while Intel has only $104 billion in value.
This was followed by appointment of two interim Co-CEOs- David Zinsner, the CFO of Intel, and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, who is now the general manager of client computing group at Intel.
Intel is in transition and trying hard to regain competitiveness and achieve manufacturing of chips for other companies such as Apple. This strategy is meant to help Intel become more agile, lean, but it has got complicated due to delays, just recently cutting a $8.5 billion government grant. However, Intel will take a further move in regaining investor confidence.
