Don’t be fooled—the Intel saga isn’t what it seems. Recent coverage narrates the sad decline of a once-great American company, with the outcome

Those calling Intel a company in decline are missing the point entirely—it’s now a corporate actor on the geopolitical stage

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2024-09-30 15:00:01

Don’t be fooled—the Intel saga isn’t what it seems. Recent coverage narrates the sad decline of a once-great American company, with the outcome looking dim. But the story is really a high-stakes thriller leading to an uncertain resolution that could carry global implications. It may take years to play out, but seeing the big picture makes each day’s news far more interesting.

Understand first what Hollywood scriptwriters call the backstory: Intel for decades dominated the global semiconductor industry, designing and manufacturing leading-edge chips. But starting around 2000 it began to fall behind, missing the bonanzas in cellphone chips and then the chips that fuel the AI revolution (note that Nvidia designs chips but doesn’t manufacture them). By 2021, Intel’s chips had fallen two generations behind the leading edge, an unprecedented and humiliating position. In crisis mode, the board brought back an Intel veteran who had left in 2008, Pat Gelsinger, to lead a rescue mission as CEO. (You can read my full case study for Fortune about how Intel lost its edge here.)

Gelsinger launched an ambitious, expensive, high-risk strategy to bring Intel back to the global forefront. He knew reaching that goal would take several years if it could be done at all. He negotiated with ASML, the only company in the world that makes machines necessary for manufacturing leading-edge chips, to sell Intel the first machine that would produce a new generation of chips. He poured many billions of dollars into capital investments that wouldn’t pay significant returns for years.