Intel ruled tech. Now it’s in deep trouble

New York CNN — When legendary former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote his bestseller “Only the Paranoid Survive” in 1996 about how to predict tech inflection points that might undermine a business, the notion that his company might face such a risk was purely theoretical. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters Other rivals, like AMD, also stole market share in the PC business, as they predicted the rise of cloud computing and as Intel struggled to keep pace with the intense innovation timeline that’s come to be known as “Moore’s law,” named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who estimated that chips could be made with twice the number of transistors, increasing their power and speed, every two years. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during an interview at a Wired event Tuesday that it’s “probably not unexpected and it’s probably even understandable” that Intel was too focused on its core central processing unit chips to predict that the AI boom would demand a shift to GPUs. So, you’re either preparing for that 10-year trend or you get caught off guard by that.” An uncertain future At the same time, Gelsinger pushed for a risky and expensive bid to expand the use of Intel’s foundries — historically a point of pride for the company — to manufacture processors for competitors like Apple, putting it into more direct competition with chipmaking giant TSMC. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images For the new interim co-CEOs who have taken over in Gelsinger’s place – CFO David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, who was also elevated from her role as general manager of Intel’s client computing group to the newly-created CEO of Intel products – there is some hope that producing lower-cost, lower-performance but more energy-efficient AI products could be a hit with smaller companies that don’t need the kind of massive computing capacity Nvidia’s pricier chips can provide, Nguyen said.