FTA:
“In March 2025, Intel appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO,” Cotton wrote in the letter. “Mr. Tan reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies and has a stake in hundreds of Chinese advanced-manufacturing and chip firms. At least eight of these companies reportedly have ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”
"Has a stake in hundreds" is true of anyone who owns a global index fund.
I don’t know about his investments, but one fact is clear: he was CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which has just pleaded guilty to federal charges for exporting technology to China. That alone should make him ineligible to lead a company with major government contracts.
If he resigns (and he will), the board should go with him.
Can you imagine the look you'd get if it was 1998 and you told me that AMD would have over twice the market capitalization of Intel in the next few decades? In 1998 Intel was 50x larger by market cap than AMD.
It is a company that has been catastrophically mismanaged.
To paraphrase, Intel has to go of the notion that for Intel to win AMD and TSMC have to lose. The strategy that follows from that might involve some painful choices.
It played out so smoothly over 3 months it seemed scripted from the start
That's not going to inspire people to step up.
Everything is legal for sure, lawyers were paid to agree. But it feels 100% like an orchestrated short of Intel. A GameStop situation.
I am fucking tired of 60+ year olds setting everyone else up for failure. They've been in charge as the problems came about. They're the problem then.
Boomers and GenX need to get out of the way or get stomped by youth.
Indeed. And his first action was to diss their own AI efforts. Because AI is just some niche area that they can ignore.
Just as Battlemage GPUs were getting decent reviews and sold above the MSRP.
Intel could totally try to capture the LLM market 'bottom up' if they wanted to.
As an underdog in the GPU market, all they need to do is start by making cheap boards with lots of VRAM. I'm talking 32GB boards under 1k.
They don't have to be fast. They just have to take these bigger models into VRAM and be fast enough that it's better than dealing with normal CPU+RAM.
That gets them into the market, and then they can follow up with more expensive and 'enterprisey' silicon that is faster for the data centers.
Alas, that's probably too alien a thought for Intel, as they prefer that thick margin...
1) How might Nvidia etc respond? They've made one-off SKUs for crypto, they could certainly respond quickly with a part that matched on memory but had much better software (meaning, more compatible with tools and better performance. AMD doesn't have the software, but their hardware is find and they could similarly up on-board memory. So Intel would really have to compete on price.
2) Ok, now we've found some 2nd or 3rd place success in a business built on logic fabbed at TSMC and DRAM from Samsung or Micron. If this is the future, why have fabs or any of the associated R&D?
I don't know what the right answers are but maintaining Intel at anything resembling its current size seems like a pretty tough puzzle.
https://newsroom.intel.com/corporate/lip-bu-tan-steps-in-the...
Why don’t you already understand this??? You are misleading everyone.
So AMD going from that to 2-3x intel's market cap is just... not quite as impressive as Apple's turnaround, but certainly in that direction.
Effective at what? Intel’s done, it’s on the Boeing trajectory, it’s just about grabbing what you can as the ship goes down.
Right — so that extends the time window for pillaging, and means that you can raid future taxpayer money, not just current assets. But there’s still no “turn around,” it’s just different flavors of getting paid massively to go down with the ship.
And not only did the Board not do their proper due diligence on Tan, but just let him toss Gelsinger's plan out? Shareholders should sue every one of them.
Frank Yeary, managing member Darwin capital advisors
James Goetz, partner Sequoia Capital
Andrea Goldsmith, dean of engineering Princeton University
Alyssa Henry, former square CEO
Eric Meurice, former CEO ASML
Barbara Novick, cofounder BlackRock
Steve Sanghi, CEO microchip
Gregory Smith, former CFO Boeing company
Stacy Smith, chair of Autodesk
Dion Weisler, former CEO HP
There are a lot of people that should not be on the board of a semiconductor company.
Investors have experience "managing" money to themselves. What is controversial about this? It's like saying pilots have experience flying planes. These investors have a lot experience financializing everything about a company.
We know where that leads, and it's not to success ... well, except for the investors with inside information that get out at the right time.
Autodesk turned into a rent seeking company over a decade ago.
Anyone Ex Boeing is sus, but maybe I'm wrong.
Ex HP CEO is also sus because HP has been slowly circling the drain for the last 20 years.
i share rhat to say, i think it's got positive connotations atm
In Soviet Russia you follow their rules and do everything/anything to win.
In US you follow the rules there and do everything/anything to win.
In China/India/country you follow the rules there and do everything/anything to win.
Through law, politics, advertising.
The ultimate goal is to win globally right?
A true capitalist leader can operate with complete lack of attachment for the sake of the corporation.