The only thing more fun than speculating about Intel’s future is asking former Intel CEOs to speculate about the chipmaker’s future.
A few months after ex-chief
Craig Barrett weighed in about the direction of the Silicon Valley icon, Pat Gelsinger has entered the chat.
The former chief and three-decade Intel veteran—who was forced out a year ago in favor of current CEO Lip-Bu Tan—
tells the Financial Times that there was “decay … deeper and harder than I’d realized” at the company.
In the years before Gelsinger returned to Intel to take its top job, “not a single product was delivered on schedule,” he said. To boot, rival TSMC had begun making some of Intel’s own chips.
The 2022 Chips Act promising tens of billions in federal funding that Gelsinger and his peers worked so hard to lobby for? “Hideous” and upsetting that it took so long to disburse the funds, Gelsinger told the
FT.
He added that there was a “touch of irony” in his successor pursuing a similar plan to his, and said he supported the recent 10% federal stake in Intel if it helps it succeed.
But the only thing that will actually bring chipmaking back to American shores? “Economic dislocation,” he said. And perhaps some sharp elbows, too.
—AN 
