Bill Gates was once the embodiment of the computer industry. Though the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft retired over a decade ago to pursue full-time philanthropy, people still listen when he talks — and in a recent interview, he talked about Intel.
Intel is having a rough time of late. The chipmaker’s stock is practically in freefall. It’s had high-profile failures for its most powerful CPUs, and rivals AMD and especially Nvidia are kicking its silicon butt in the AI arms race. In December, the company’s CEO Pat Gelsinger stepped down after working for Intel on-and-off for decades. Yeah, it’s bad.
Intel is also one of Microsoft’s most important partners, so it’s no surprise that the company’s woes came up in an interview with the Associated Press. “I am stunned that Intel basically lost its way,” Gates said.
“They missed the AI chip revolution, and with their fabrication capabilities, they don’t even use standards that people like Nvidia and Qualcomm find easy.
I thought Pat Gelsinger was very brave to say, ‘No, I am going to fix the design side, I am going to fix the fab side.’ I was hoping for his sake, for the country’s sake, that he would be successful. I hope Intel recovers, but it looks pretty tough for them at this stage.”
It’s a bleak snippet in an otherwise positive interview, and it doesn’t offer any realistic paths for Intel to make up ground. The company’s most recent desktop and laptop chips have been met with more acclaim, and its new discrete GPUs are positioned to thrive in a budget space that has been woefully underserved for the last few years.
But you can’t make hundreds of billions in profit selling cards to cash-strapped PC gamers… and with Nvidia still standing strong even after taking a hard knock from the DeepSeek news, that’s definitely the measure of success for modern chipmakers.
Don’t take this for hyperbole. Intel isn’t in danger of an imminent collapse. But after dominating the market for both consumers and enterprises for decades, the company simply isn’t the powerhouse it was a few years ago. The most recent development is that the stock price got a welcome shot in the arm following rumors of an acquisition, something that would have been unthinkable not so long ago.