‘I will make it perfect.’ New Intel CEO promises to fix what’s wrong

Newly appointed Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said all the right things in his opening statement as Intel’s new chief executive, pledging to earn customer trust and return to an engineering-based culture at the chipmaker.

Tan, who has served about two weeks on the job, didn’t indicate any major changes would be forthcoming. For now, he emphasized that Intel’s next-generation Panther Lake chips would ship this year, on the Intel 18A process node that is the legacy of Tan’s predecessor, Pat Gelsinger.

Gelsinger, a former chief technical officer at Intel who also promised a return to the engineering-driven days of Intel legends like Gordon Moore, was forced out in December after pushing through a series of layoffs, and watching the company’s stock price plunge. Chief financial officer David Zinsner and Intel Products chief Michelle Johnston Holthaus served as co-CEOs before returning to those positions. Now, Tan will take the helm.

Tan is well-regarded, though he served in the semiconductor-adjacent industry of electronic design automation as the chief executive of Cadence Design Systems from 2008 until 2021. He studied quantum physics in Singapore, moved to the United States to pursue a doctorate in nuclear engineering at MIT, then dropped out of the program after the Three Mile Island accident occurred. He later became a venture capitalist and a member of Intel’s board.

Tan cited a visit to Henry David Thoreau’s cabin, where he spent a half hour just admiring the craftsmanship. “A lot of our business is building craftsmanship,” Tan said.

Now, he’s being asked to lead one of America’s largest chipmaker as it extends those chipmaking abilities to third-party customers as well via an Intel foundry plan.

Tan pledged to build “strong teams to correct the past mistakes and start to earn your trust,” speaking in front of customers and partners at Intel’s Vision conference. Though not a semiconductor executive by trade, Tan said that’s he was friends with the late Intel senior vice president (and Pentium 4 chief) Albert Yu and former Intel senior executive Sean Maloney, who retired from Intel in 2013 after recovering from a devastating stroke.

Tan said that Intel will “refine some of our strategy and then free up some of the bandwidth and some of the non-core business, we will spin it off.” Intel’s core business — whatever it is, as he didn’t specify — will be expanded using AI and “software 2.0.” He also pledged to work with the Trump administration on advancing Intel’s foundry business.

“My motto is very simple: under promise and over deliver,” Tan said.

“I love this company,” Tan said. “It was very hard for me to watch its struggle. I simply cannot stay on the sideline knowing that I could help turn things around. I also fully recognize it won’t be easy. It had been a tough period for quite a long time for Intel, we fell behind on innovation. As a result, we have been too slow to adapt and to meet your needs. You deserve better, and we need to improve, and we will, please be brutally honest with us.”

“We may not be perfect in the beginning, but eventually, you can count on it, I will make it perfect,” Tan said.