After missing the boat on chips for mobile devices and chips for artificial intelligence, the legendary chipmaker Intel is going through one of the most complicated moments in its history. This Monday, the man who had drawn up the plan to get her out of the quagmire unexpectedly announced his retirement. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, is leaving his position immediately and leaving the strategy to restructure the company and adapt it to the new reality of the sector in the air.
The move has not left the company time to appoint a successor. For now, it has indicated that its financial director, David Zinsner, and the CEO of the product division, Michelle Johnston, will occupy the executive direction of Intel on an interim basis. “The board has formed a search committee and will work diligently and quickly to find a permanent successor to Gelsinger,” the company said.
Gelsinger had held the position of CEO of Intel since 2021. He then returned to a company that he had left a decade earlier after a long career that had included being the youngest vice president in the history of the multinational, at 32 years old, and its first director of technology in 1979.
Now, at 63 years old, Gelsinger steps aside, leaving Intel’s restructuring strategy that began in 2023 unfinished. “Today is a bittersweet day,” he said: “I can look back with pride at everything we have achieved.” together. “It has been a challenging year for all of us as we have made difficult but necessary decisions to position Intel for current market dynamics.”
Intel announced this summer the layoff of 15% of its workforce, some 10,000 employees, to alleviate the profitability crisis that caused its shares to collapse. Other measures on the table are breaking up the multinational into several companies, separating its chip design division from its manufacturing division.
The news adds even more uncertainty to the semiconductor factory construction projects that Intel is leading in the US and Europe. In Europe, the American multinational had committed to the German Government to launch a mega production plant for around 47,000 million euros, of which the Germans were going to provide around 11,000 million of public money.
In the US, Intel was going to put about $100 billion on the table to build new factories in Arizona and Ohio, as well as modernize existing ones in New Mexico and Oregon. Joe Biden was going to reward that bet with about $20 billion, of which about $8.5 billion would be direct aid and another $11 billion would be loans.
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