In his first major address since taking over the CEO job at Intel, Lip-Bu Tan explained why he took the job, recounted the challenge that Intel faces, and detailed how he’ll work to turn the chipmaker around.
Tan covered a lot of ground during his 30-minute speech at the company’s Intel Vision 2025 conference in Las Vegas. He started out by sharing his admiration for Henry David Thoreau and his contrarian nature. “One of my favorite quotes he has is rather than love, than money and fame, give me the truth,” he said.
That truth-seeking contrarian streak paid dividends at Walden International, the venture capital fund that Tan founded in 1987. “When semiconductors were not popular 20 years ago, I doubled down,” he said. “I make 251 semiconductor related investment. Of this we have 43 IPOs and 25 successful M&A.”
When he started his 12-year-run as CEO of Cadence Design System in 2009, the company was struggling. But by changing the culture of the team and adopting a culture of innovation and customer satisfaction, Ban was able to turn the company into a foundry powerhouse generating nearly $5 billion in revenue at a $71 billion market cap.
“Overall, this experience taught me a lot,” he said. “My time at Walden trained me to how to build a company from start up with a small team and focus and address what company needs,” he said. “And my time as Cadence CEO helped me to understand design methodology, foundry ecosystem, and what it takes to delight customers.”
Most of all, Tan talked about Intel, the existential struggle that it faces, and how he intends to help lead the company back to the silicon promised land.
“Some of the people [are] asking me why take on this job now at this stage in your career?” the 65-year-old Tan said halfway through his speech. “The answer is very simple: I love this company. It was very hard for me to watch it struggle. I simply cannot stay on the sideline knowing that I could help turn things around.”
Tan requested Intel customers to be brutally honest with him in addressing its shortcomings as he rebuilds the company, repairs the balance sheet, repositions the company to attract new talent, and focus on developing better products.
“We fell behind on innovation,” Tan said. “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. This is what I expect from you this week and I believe harsh feedback is most valuable.”
Tan knows all too well the power that a good shaming from a customer can have. In one of his customer review sessions early at Cadence, his customers gave him Ds and Fs. It turned into a turning point for Cadence, and he hopes to do the same at Intel.
“That’s humiliating and I learned a lot,” Tan said. “Because in my career in academic, I never get anything below B. It’s humiliating, but it’s really ignite me to change.”
Tan said he is going to refocus the company on innovation. To do that, he’s going to treat Intel as a startup.
Intel is the only American company that designs and manufacturers chips, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said at Intel Vision 2025
“We’re going to really drive some new ideas, giving engineers freedom to innovate from within,” he said. “Most importantly, we will simplify the way we work. Bureaucracy kills innovation.”
By focusing on small, focused teams, Tan is convinced that he can unleash the innovation within Intel engineers and take on incumbents (which can only mean Nvidia, the GPU behemoth that’s now the most valuable company in the world).
“We may not be perfect in the beginning, but eventually you can count on it. I will make it perfect,” Tan promised. “This will unleash the potential I know exists across my team. It will also help us attract new talent from outside, and they can join us and enter this most exciting period of creating innovation and creating the new Intel.”
AI is driving a total architectural change in computing, Tan said, particularly among the cloud hyperscalers. Beyond that, Tan talked about Software 2.0, robotics, quantum computing, and photonics. Tan said he intends to spin off some non-core businesses so it can focus on developing new compute architecture platform, as well as its foundry business.
These trends are fundamentally reshaping Intel’s approach to developing hardware, Tan said. Instead of general purpose designs, the world wants purpose-built silicon that’s designed and optimized for specific workloads.
“In the past, Intel’s approach has been inside out. We designed hardware, then you figure out developing the software to make it work,” he said. “The world has changed. You have to flip that around. Going forward, we will start with the problem, what you’re trying to solve and the workloads you need to enable, then we work backward from that. That requires [us to] embrace the software 2.0 mentality, which means that having software-first design the mindset.”
Tan reiterated Intel’s commitment to the 14A process node, a 1.4 nanometer process technology expected to go online in 2026, and mentioned that its 18A process node passed a crucial milestone this week that’s expected to enable volume production of its Panther Lake chips by the second half of the year.
“We are here to serve you and earn your trust,” he told the Intel Vision audience in Vegas. “I won’t be happy and satisfied until we are consistently delivering our promise on time, on quality, to exceed your expectations. And we have to earn it. And we know that we are deeply committed to the journey, and I personally [am] committed to this journey.”
You can watch a replay of Tan’s address here.
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