Intel CEO Tan Rips Up Former CEO Gelsinger’s Playbook, Brings Talent Back And Strips Silos To Salvage Data Center Business

Daniel Nenni · 2026-05-19T20:33:12-0700

In a fresh interview, Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan candidly discussed his firm's current market position and the mistakes made under the previous position. Tan, whose tenure at Intel has seen the firm manage to turn around its dismal share price performance, is one of the most experienced executives in the industry. During Intel's latest earnings call, he shifted the narrative around the AI buildout and asserted that agentic AI would make CPUs relevant in the ongoing multi-billion-dollar buildout. In his interview, he admitted that the currently high demand for CPUs could only grow in the future and added that his firm lost leadership in the data center segment under former CEO Patrick Gelsinger.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan Admits His Firm Made Mistakes In The Past

Over the course of the past few years, Intel has consistently lost market share to its former rival AMD. The dip in market share has been accompanied by a dip in market price, with AMD's latest market capitalization of $689 billion higher than Intel's $563 billion despite the latter's share price having jumped 182% year-to-date

In fact, as of the third quarter of 2025, Intel's market share in the server market fell to a multi-year low of 72% while its server revenue share sat at an even lower 61%. Both of these were 91% during the first quarter of 2019.

In his interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer, Tan admitted that his firm had made mistakes. "We used to have leadership in data center, and over the years we lost it," he said. To rectify the errors, the Intel CEO outlined that he has brought back former workers to focus on product lines.

A line chart titled 'Intel Server CPU Market Share' shows a decline in Intel's server unit and revenue shares from 97% in

Image Source: Bernstein Analysis

Intel CEO Shares Insights On His Transformation Plan For The Firm

Tan also discussed the yields of Intel's 18A chip manufacturing technology. This manufacturing process has been in the news lately due to Intel's deal with Apple to provide the latter with chips built through it. While admitting that the yield was unsatisfactory when he took over, the Intel CEO explained that "the best practice is to see 7% or 8% yield improvement per month, and now I’m seeing it.”

Returning to the mistakes under his predecessor, Tan remarked that his firm had corrected them and rectified Intel's roadmap. One change he's made is to have all the engineers report to him so that he has "an understanding, hear from the customer, and know where are the mistakes.”

Under the previous management, Intel, according to him, "had too many silos, too many people reporting." To correct the compartmentalization, he decided "the best thing is to really understand where the problem is, so I can focus on the engineering, how to redesign, simplify the product and then get the real killer products out.”