Three months after Intel summarily ousted its previous CEO, America’s ailing chip giant has a new boss: Lip-Bu Tan.
The news cheered investors, who bid Intel’s shares up more than 10% in after hours trading on Wednesday. By all measures, Tan is an impressive and eminently qualified choice for the job. A semiconductor industry veteran who served as CEO of chip design software powerhouse Cadence Design Systems for more than a decade, Tan possesses the rare combination of skills and experience to lead an organization as large, complex, and unique as Intel.
For anyone of the opinion that Intel needs a radical shake-up in order to survive however, Tan is a curious choice.
One of Intel’s biggest problems throughout its recent history has been its inability to make tough decisions; vacillating instead between tepid attempts to have it both ways. Is Intel a chip design company or a chip manufacturing company? Is its identity tied to the x86 architecture or is it a chipmaker with the dexterity to conquer markets using other designs (consider the ill-fated StrongARM or Itanium chips)? Is it a PC and server chip company or an AI chip company?
Tan embodies Intel’s innate ambivalence and predilection for wavering. He’s the first outsider ever to get the CEO gig at Intel … sort of. He served on Intel’s board from 2022 to 2024, a period when Intel has struggled, so he’s arguably part of the existing regime (Tan resigned from the board in August 2024 citing “a personal decision based on a need to reprioritize various commitments”).
With his background at Cadence, Tan understands the design side of the chip business as well as the manufacturing side, having worked closely with chip fabrication facilities. It’s not easy finding someone with that skill set—and it doesn’t clearly commit Intel to any one particular path. Had Intel appointed a financial type for the top job, the divestiture of Intel’s chip manufacturing facilities — essentially splitting the company in two as some former Intel directors have called for —would have been all but written on the wall. If Intel had picked a grizzled company lifer, in the mold of former CEO Craig Barrett, the message of a unified, unbreakable Intel, would have resonated loud and clear.
“In areas where we have momentum, we need to double down and extend our advantage,” Tan wrote in a letter to Intel staffers on Tuesday. “In areas where we are behind the competition, we need to take calculated risks to disrupt and leapfrog. And in areas where our progress has been slower than expected, we need to find new ways to pick up the pace.”
That sounds like a commitment to Intel’s chip fabrication operations, where the company has fallen behind the competition, while being just vague enough to leave Tan plenty of leeway. Tan’s work as a venture capitalist investing in AI startups also raises exciting possibilities for Intel to get serious about AI chips and challenging industry leader Nvidia, but it’s hardly a guarantee of a strategic rethink.
Tan is the Goldilocks CEO pick. He’s got everything it takes to make everyone happy. Whether that’s what Intel actually needs right now will be the big story to watch in 2025.
