Intel's new chief executive told analysts that work on overhauling the company's operations had reached roughly the four-fifths mark. Speaking to a television news outlet, Lip-Bu Tan noted that the majority of the company's top-tier leadership had been replaced under his watch since he took the helm in March 2025, as the chipmaker works to recover lost ground in advanced semiconductor production and artificial intelligence.
Among the leadership additions Tan has made is Seok-Hee Lee, who previously held the top executive post at SK hynix, alongside a handful of other newly appointed senior figures.
Purchases of Intel stock by Nvidia and SoftBank — totalling $5 billion and $2 billion in shares, respectively — have added prominent investor support to the company's ongoing recovery effort. Shares in Intel have climbed to roughly four times their value from the point at which Tan took the helm.
No timeline for completing the restructuring was offered by Tan, who also left unaddressed which specific steps in the process had yet to be carried out.
Two distinct competitive pressures bear down on Intel — one in the advanced chip-fabrication arena, where TSMC holds a manufacturing edge, and another in the AI chip market, where Nvidia and other companies are also vying for position.
Billions of dollars in manufacturing expansion and a push to build out a foundry operation defined Intel's strategic direction while Pat Gelsinger held the chief executive role. A net loss of $16.6 billion weighed on the company's third-quarter 2024 books during an ongoing restructuring push, and Gelsinger's departure followed that December.
Rebuilding Intel's contract manufacturing division into a competitive business is a process Tan has publicly framed as one that will unfold across a long runway. Drawing on TSMC's own rise as a reference point, he observed that the Taiwanese chipmaker needed somewhere between a decade and two decades to establish itself at the top of the global foundry industry. Putting new manufacturing processes into practice and getting factory infrastructure off the ground demands investment running into the billions, spread across multiple years, he noted.
State backing, he noted, could position Intel to pursue the extended investment timelines that factory construction and next-generation technology development typically demand. Federal funding that had been set aside was restructured into an $8.9 billion equity arrangement, giving the government a 9.9% ownership share in Intel while leaving it without a seat at the boardroom table. A subsequent share offering brought that ownership position down to roughly 8.2%.
According to Tan, the administration holds no sway over Intel's strategic direction through its ownership position, leaving the chipmaker free to chart its own course.
Asked about competition from China's semiconductor industry, Tan put forward a position grounded in balance — each side of that divide, he argued, brings its own set of strengths and shortcomings, and what ultimately steers a buyer's choice, whether that buyer is a household consumer or a multinational corporation, is how well a given technology holds up against their actual requirements. Border-related political tensions are among the factors that any planning process needs to weigh.
When a reporter posed the question of whether domestic chip makers could close the gap with their American counterparts within a decade, Tan responded that the distance separating the two was already narrower than many assumed.
