Asa Fitch
speaker
119 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard 16 Jun
Asa Fitch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And that's the context into which Pat Gelsinger arrives.
So Pat Gelsinger is Intel's first chief technology officer, first CTO. He's a guy who was sort of born and bred Intel.
You know, when you talk about Intel inside, that marketing campaign in the 90s, Those chips that were going in those computers were in large part, you know, thanks to Pat Gelsinger. You know, he did a lot in helping design those things.
They were going to go full steam ahead, create this contract chip making business within Intel, and use that to fill up its factories and do more manufacturing, basically, and make more money. And as part of that, Intel was going to expand its factory footprint, just build more factories.
The problem in the chip industry is that you have to make decisions today about what you're going to need several years from now, even five, ten years from now. Gelsinger had to essentially predict many years in advance what the demand might be for these chips and build those factories accordingly.
You're betting. It's fundamentally a bet.
It was. I mean, it was absolutely. And Pat said at the time, you know, it was a bet the company move.
You know, Intel tried to attract customers for its contract shipmaking business. And it had trouble. I mean, the big customers for the contract shipmaking business are Apple, NVIDIA, of course. You know, Qualcomm, there's some others. But Intel had this internal goal that they were going to be the second largest contract chip maker in the world by 2030. And, you know, it's almost 2025.
And the amount of major customers that Intel was getting in the door was just, you know, it wasn't huge.
Contract shipmaking is really a customer service business. If your customer wants something, you bend over backwards to make it happen for them. For Intel, they hadn't really been like that. Their customer had been just Intel. They didn't really have that experience. Dealing with those kinds of customers meant that it was just a little bit more difficult to get that business started.
Basically, it's ChatGPT. ChatGPT came along and that leads to a flurry of interest and investment in generative AI, people developing these big AI models. And that in turn leads to huge investments in chips that are needed to build these kinds of models. And those chips are made almost entirely by NVIDIA.
So that was a huge, huge challenge for Intel. When the AI boom really took hold, everything was going to AI chips. And a significantly less amount of money was going to Intel's chips. So there was this dramatic shift that really hurt Intel financially at a time when
The company really just needed money to build these huge factories that cost billions upon billions of dollars and execute this turnaround plan that Pat had concocted. So it really could not have come at a worse time for Intel.
Then, last week... Intel just moments ago announcing that CEO Pat Gelsinger retired effective yesterday.
According to someone familiar with what happened... It was retirement, but the circumstances were that the board gave him the option to retire or be removed, and he chose to retire.
You know, many people were surprised by Gelsinger being ousted because, you know, this is a very ambitious turnaround plan. The company had already invested a lot of resources in making the turnaround work. Intel has been on successive rounds of cost cutting for the past couple of years at this point. They've done layoffs, they've cut costs wherever they can.
And all of that has been in service of making this plan work. And so there's a lot of surprise, actually, that at this juncture Gelsinger would be ousted. But, you know, I think the board just sort of lost confidence in Pat and the plan and the way that the speed at which it was going and the results from it.
It's hard to know how this period of the company's history will come to be seen, but it may be that it's seen as, you know, no CEO could have turned around Intel. But if somebody could have, it would have been Pat Gelsinger, and this would have been the plan. It just didn't work out.
And, you know, maybe the history shows that in the final analysis that if Intel were to be set aright again, it would have had to have happened a long time before Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO. When you get that big, it's harder to, you know, as Lou Gerster wrote in his book about IBM, make elephants dance, if you will, you know, make large companies do agile things is hard.
And what Intel has needed in the past years has been agility.
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