In his first quarterly earnings call on Intel CEO, Lip-Bu Tan emphasized the operational changes he is making at the troubled company–like his flattening of the organizational structure and a mandate for Intel employees to come to the office four days a week–but was more general when addressing concerns about Intel’s AI market competitiveness and the future of its foundry strategy.
Some of the organizational changes are intended to give Intel a chance to return to engineering prominence, and remove corporate and cultural restraints that Tan said were “suffocating the innovation” efforts at the company, but how that will affect Intel’s product roadmap remains to be seen.
Jack Gold, president and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, told Fierce Electronics that Tan “is an engineering guy at heart and wants Intel to become the same engineering driven company it had been in its past, but lost over the past several years.” Gold added that eliminating layers of management “should help with the ability to execute more nimbly and quickly.”
What that means for Intel’s AI roadmap remains to be seen, as Tan said during the company’s first quarter earnings call that Intel needs “to refine our AI strategy with a focus on emerging areas of interest… Our goal will be to take our integrated system and platform view to develop full stack AI solutions that enable more accuracy, power efficiency and security for our enterprise customers. Our goal will be to enable the next wave of computing defined by reasoning models, Agentic AI and physical AI.”
But, timing will be critical as Intel is widely observed to be losing market share in segments like data center AI to AMD. Later on the earnings call, Tan said the company is still “working through the road map” and “defining what the new workloads look like in terms of the CPU, GPU and AI and then driving that into some short-term and some longer-term products.” He also made a tantalizing comment that Intel “may embrace some of the disruptive technology that is out there,” but did not get into further specifics.
Meanwhile, for the Intel Foundry Services business, the future still looks hazy. Tan said during the earnings call that Intel needs to focus most on building trust with its external foundry customers. “We have a lot of important building blocks in place including the ramp of Intel 18A in the second half of 2025 to support the launch of our first Panther Lake SKU by year-end, with additional SKUs coming in the first half of 2026. However, I know from my years at Cadence Design that success in foundry business requires more than process technology, and manufacturing capabilities alone. It is first and foremost, a customer service business built on the foundational principle of trust, and we need to instill a customer service mindset across our foundry business.”
Inherent to that mindset, he added, will be the recognition that every foundry customer “uses different design tools, methodologies and styles.” He referenced leveraging more reliance on “best design practices and more use of electronic design automation (EDA) tools, which is not surprising coming from the former longtime CEO of EDA house Cadence Design Systems.
“We must learn to delight our customers by building wafers that meet their [requirements for] power, performance, area, cost, quality, yield, reliability and on-time schedule,” Tan continued. “While we are currently focused on delivering Intel 18A, we are also working closely with customers to define the critical KPIs to ensure online delivery of Intel 14A.”
However, these comments on customer focus come as the products side of Intel is outsourcing the manufacturing of some of its own processors, like Lunar Lake, to TSMC, and as Intel reportedly continues to talk to TSMC about an as-yet-undefined partnership that could shape the future path of its foundry unit.
Gold believes Tan’s experience in the fab side of the chip sector ultimately will help as Intel tries to make more of its own chips, while also seeking to win more external foundry customers, some of them competitors. He said, “I do believe he sees it as a competitive advantage for Intel in that it enables Intel to not only produce its own best chips (although not exclusively since it still plans to outsource some portion of its chips for an ability to have a ‘buffer’ that can increase manufacturing volumes as needed), and also provides Intel an opportunity to make the fabs much better by having to compete for external customers (they are not particularly competitive at the moment). He knows the fab business inside and out from his previous roles, and he has many contacts in that business area that he will leverage to make Intel Fab a real competitor.”