Pat Gelsinger is retiring from Intel after three turbulent years

Push-up artist and Intel’s main face for the past three years, Pat Gelsinger, is retiring effective immediately. The company’s CEO had worked for Intel on and off for more than three decades, but only spent three years as CEO. After being the face of the Intel stock crash, Pat’s sudden retirement leaves many questions. What is clear is that Intel’s leadership is aiming for a change of direction.

Intel announced Gelsinger’s departure late Sunday. The company does not have a real replacement. Instead, the company’s board will appoint two interim co-CEOs while the company searches for a new boss. If Gelsinger’s departure was at all intentional, it would still be an awkward time for the company. Intel is preparing to release two new discrete GPUs this week and will also have to deal with all the new competing processors and computer hardware coming to CES in January next year.

Gelsinger was Intel boss during a turbulent time for the company. It lagged behind in AI training chips while competitor Nvidia became one of the most profitable companies in the world. While its first “AI PC” chips launched in December 2023, the company had to wait until the Lunar Lake series was discontinued earlier this year before it could get Microsoft’s “Copilot+ PC.”

So was Intel is investigating how it deals with a voltage problem on some of its 13th and 14th generation desktop CPUs that could lock up users’ computers. The company experienced waves of layoffs earlier this year, and then launched its latest Arrow Lake desktop Intel Core Ultra chips in October. didn’t set the world on fire.

Intel acknowledged problems with Arrow Lake in an interview with HotHardware last month. Intel’s vice president of client AI and technical marketing, Robert Hallock, said: “We have identified a number of issues – multi-factor issues – they are at the operating system and BIOS level, and the performance we have seen in the test reports …was not what we expected and not what we intended.”

The company has long relied on being one of the top two chipmakers for most PCs used in the United States and elsewhere. For this reason, Intel is referred to as “Team Blue” while its competitor AMD is called “Team Red”. Then Qualcomm changed the game with ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips. Microsoft placed great emphasis on its new range of laptop processors, which promised the epitome of battery life and performance for small devices.

Intel’s Lunar Lake chips gained some ground in battery life and X86 performance, but OEMs haven’t adopted some of the more expensive and powerful Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors. When it comes to making its chips, Intel received $8.5 billion through the US CHIPS Act to build new factories in Arizona.

Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, who will also be CEO of Intel’s product, data center and AI groups, will assume the role of co-CEO.

Gelsinger worked at Intel from 1979 to 2009 and returned in February 2021. Intel’s board hoped it would right the ship. It’s unclear whether Intel’s former CEO was pressured to retire, but this latest restructuring just shows that the company’s current initiatives weren’t working as well as intended.