How Intel Got Left Behind in the A.I. Chip Boom
Intel was for decades Silicon Valley’s dominant chip company. But missed opportunities and poor execution left it on the sidelines in tech’s latest gold rush.
A photo illustration of a silicon chip, mounted in a picture frame, on a shelf with cobwebs around it. Credit... Kevin Van Aelst
Steve Lohr has written about the tech industry since the 1990s. Don Clark has covered the chip industry for more than 35 years.
In 2005, there was no inkling of the artificial intelligence boom that would come years later. But directors at Intel, whose chips served as electronic brains in most computers, faced a decision that might have altered how that transformative technology evolved.
Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive at the time, presented the board with a startling idea: Buy Nvidia, a Silicon Valley upstart known for chips used for computer graphics. The price tag: as much as $20 billion.
Some Intel executives believed that the underlying design of graphics chips could eventually take on important new jobs in data centers, an approach that would eventually dominate A.I. systems.
