Inside the mind of Intel’s new CEO: ‘Disrupt and Leapfrog’

Tan’s selection as the chipmaker’s new chief executive was cheered by analysts, bankers and shareholders. He brings two decades of semiconductor industry experience, relationships across the sector, a startup mindset and an obsession with AI…and basketball.

He also comes with tricky China business relationships, underscoring Silicon Valley’s inability to sever itself from one of America’s top adversaries.

How Tan, age 65, will use his assets to resurrect Intel is on the minds of all industry watchers. Intel has gone from being one of Silicon Valley’s biggest innovators to a relic struggling to compete with superstar Nvidia and others in the age of artificial intelligence. Its stock has lost two-thirds of its value in four short years as Intel sat out the AI boom.

Intel shares were up more than 14% at market close Thursday from the previous day.

Tan will soon have to answer the most burning question about Intel’s future: whether he will break apart Intel’s design and foundry businesses. Manufacturing chips is an enormous expense that Intel can’t currently sustain, say industry leaders and analysts. Former board members have called for a split-up.

But a deal to sell all or part of Intel to competitors seems to be off the table for the immediate future, according to bankers. A variety of early-stage discussions with Broadcom, Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries and TSMC in recent months have failed to go anywhere, and so far seem unlikely to progress.

The company has already hinted at a more likely outcome: bringing in outside financial backers, including customers who want a stake in the manufacturing business.

Intel’s fortunes also rest in part with President Trump, who has signaled that he wants to unwind the Chips Act, signature legislation from former President Joe Biden to invest more than $50 billion in semiconductors. Intel would receive up to about $8 billion through the legislation, contingent on development of new factories which have faced delays.

Resetting Intel’s culture

Tan has likely no more than a year to turn the company around, said people close to the company. His decades of investing in startups and running companies—he founded a multinational venture firm and was CEO of chip design company Cadence Design Systems for 13 years—provide indications of how Tan will tackle this task in the early days: by cutting expenses, moving quickly and trying to turn Intel back into an engineering-first company.

“In areas where we are behind the competition, we need to take calculated risks to disrupt and leapfrog," Tan said in a note to Intel employees on Wednesday. “And in areas where our progress has been slower than expected, we need to find new ways to pick up the pace."

Intel declined to make Tan available for an interview.

Many take this culture reset to also mean significant cuts at Intel, which already shed about 15,000 jobs last year.

“He is brave enough to adjust the workforce to the size needed for the business today," said Reed Hundt, a former Intel board member who has known Tan since the 1990s.

Tan’s first tour at Intel, as a board member from 2022 to 2024, ended in frustration, people close to him say. Although he cited time demands as reason for departing, company insiders believed Tan was fed up with the bloated workforce and the direction under then-CEO Pat Gelsinger. Tan’s return, then, signals an inevitable change in strategy.

Tan’s capabilities aside, Intel remains far behind in modern chip production, said Mark Rosenblatt, founder of Rationalwave Capital Partners. “And Intel’s balance sheet is not sufficient for the cost required to sustainably achieve it and scale the manufacturing needed to support it."

‘One team’ management

Cadence was going through turmoil similar to Intel’s when Tan took over in 2009. He was able to refocus the business, push its services to the cloud and land new customers, including Apple. A company on the brink of delisting went on to return more than 3,000% in its share price during Tan’s tenure.

Tan, in public talks, has described how he approached reshaping Cadence’s culture to eliminate what he described as silos. “I tried to change it to a one-team culture," Tan said in a 2018 interview with the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

That approach harks back to what he calls his first love: basketball. Born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, Tan aspired to be a professional basketball player, until his mother told him to “get a real job," he said during a video interview in January.

Tan, who declared the arrival of generative AI as bigger than the invention of the web, has spent the past several years investing in AI startups across the globe. An Israeli AI company he backed, Habana Labs, sold to Intel for roughly $2 billion in 2019. He has often touted the potential for AI to revolutionize drug development, particularly for cancer.

The China connection

Before he rose in the semiconductor industry, Tan was known as one of the first Silicon Valley venture capitalists to invest in Asia. Tan is founder and chairman of Walden International, a prolific investor in Chinese technology startups.

Tan was a big champion of China’s semiconductor sector in an era when U.S.-China relations were considerably rosier, including co-investing with a China state-owned asset manager.

Walden was an early investor in Semiconductor Manufacturing International, which the Commerce Department blacklisted for its alleged ties to the Chinese military in 2020. Walden sold its last stake in 2021. In 2023, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter to Tan raising “serious concern" about Walden’s investments in China, including companies the U.S. had blacklisted. A subsequent report from the committee highlighted hundreds of millions of dollars of Walden investments that went to Chinese companies involved in military activities or human-rights abuses.

As word of Tan’s new role spread, one Chinese media outlet headlined the news: “Intel hires ‘the CEO with the best knowledge of China’s chip industry.’"