Statements in this presentation that refer to future plans or expectations are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and involve many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. For more information on the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, see our most recent earnings release and SEC filings at www.intc.com.
Here's the thing: all the greatness in the world—every peak, every breakthrough, every game-changing, paradigm-shifting accomplishment you admire out there—didn't come from out there. Greatness, true greatness, your greatness, it can be easy to lose sight of. It is here, inside, inside all of us, inside you. Greatness, that can always grow greater. All it needs is ignition. Let's hit that switch, push the throttle, kick that door wide open. After all, we know a thing or two about what's inside—how to amplify it, how to multiply it, accelerate it. You are not just leaning into the future; you are launching into it, with more ingenuity inside, more creativity inside, more security, innovation, intelligence. Because that greatness inside you, that is your superpower. Helping you unleash it? That's ours.
Please welcome to the stage, Chief Executive Officer, Lip-Bu Tan.
Good afternoon. Thank you so much for coming to Vision 2025. I want to thank all the sponsors that we have. Also, we have a great line of workshop speakers, and hopefully, you will get something out of it during the trip. First of all, I want to be really grateful for your presence and also your support. I'm excited to lead Intel at this defining moment in our history. It has been my 14th day, a very short time, since I joined the company. Thank you for your support. This is not a long time, but long enough for me to have some clear observations and plan to go forward. This is a perfect place to share them with all of you. My number one priority since my first day on the job has been spending time with customers.
I have trusted relationships and friendships with many of the customers over the decades. Because of our relationship and my humility, they give me very honest feedback. It is very clear from the early conversation: we have a lot of hard work ahead. There are areas we have fallen short of your expectation. I will pull together strong teams to correct the past mistakes and start to earn your trust. My motto is very simple: under-promise and over-deliver. That has been my trademark. I will not be satisfied until we delight all of you. I have been spending time also with our technical teams. Many of the architects, engineers, I personally reach out. Under my leadership, Intel will be an engineering-focused company. One of my top priorities is to retain and recruit top talents in engineering, and that's empower innovation and growth.
I believe Intel has lost some of these talents over the years. I want to create a culture of innovation empowerment. Our ambition is ultimately to create the best products and become the best foundry over the years. It will require us to unleash the power of our engineers. Before I talk some of the way I think we can do that, let me share a little bit of my background. I was born in Malaysia, Johor, and moved to Singapore and grew up in Singapore. I did my undergrad studies in physics, actually quantum physics, at Nanyang Technological University. I served a few years as a trustee, and I also advised the school. I moved to the U.S., and I received my graduate degree in nuclear engineering at MIT, nuclear engineering. It's an interesting background.
My education gave me a deep understanding of how to solve hard technical problems through engineering design. After the Three Mile Island accident happened, I decided not to finish my PhD, even though I finished all my courses. Instead, I moved to San Francisco. My mom was very worried about me, asked my brothers and sisters—they're all professors in the university—how I dropped out of school. At least my brother came by and visited and replied to my mom, "He's okay." I fell in love with Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley. I founded Walden International Group of Venture Funds. When I started, I only managed $3 million, and only a few family friends invested with me. Over the years, I built to $5 billion under management. It's a name inspired by a thinker, a poet, and a philosopher I admire, Henry David Thoreau.
How many of them have read the book? It is an amazing book. One of my favorite quotes he has is, "Rather than love, than money and fame, give me the truth." That really speaks to me all my life because I always want to have my customers, my team, my partner, my wife give me the truth. Likewise, they also expect me to give the truth. We can together fix problems and move forward as a team. I also admire him because he is a contrarian. If you visit his cabin, how he built is a beautiful handcraft. I stayed there for almost half an hour to look at every corner, how he built to the detail. That is craftsmanship. A lot of our business is about building craftsmanship. It is more art than science. You need to have the style.
As a venture capitalist, I always work to find the hidden opportunity where others were not looking. When semiconductors were not popular 20 years ago, I doubled down. I still remember I visited two Tier 1 venture capital firms that I respect and admire. When I set up a meeting, they all come in the conference room. After I talked about semiconductors, half of the team just left. The other half is sympathetic, tried to listen to me. To the end, there's only two guys left in the room. They asked me in a whisper, "Do you have software service or AI startup that we can talk about?" It is not very popular. I took a contrarian long-term view that even my investor asked me, "Are you crazy?" All the Tier 1 venture firms already thought that it's a sunset industry.
Even some of the professors in the university, they thought it's a sunset industry. I decided to double down, being a contrarian. It really paid off. I invest a lot in the semiconductor. Some of them, like the high-speed connectivity, like Astera Labs, and now in the photonics, in Celestial AI, and some of the cooling technology that is badly needed. Some of these processors use a lot of high power. How do you bring the power down with microfluidic cooling? That's something that's really exciting to me. Some of the infrastructure, you have to move to photonics. I call it the photonic fabrics platform. Some new material, CMOS, getting to a level that I think you need some new material, like gallium nitride, silicon carbide, and indium phosphide to the next generation of application.
Overall, I made 251 semiconductor-related investments. Of these, we have 43 IPOs and 25 successful M&A. I expanded towards content creation, like some of you may be familiar with called Typeface. I was an early investor in that company. I used to use a lot of Google Search. Now I changed to Perplexity Search. It is a very interesting, different way of conversation search that I like. Software, cloud service, and also AI safety-related areas. I invested quite a bit in this company and together thought AI, virtual AI, and many of these genetic areas of AI. Most recently, I've been focused on generative and agentic AI, as well as applications in life sciences and medical innovations.
A good friend of mine, he built this using the brainwaves to help Parkinson's patients to how to use semiconductors to drive 82% accuracy of the conversations. Some of the medical innovation is amazing. My experience in VC prepared me well for 12 years as a CEO of Cadence Design when they asked me to step in as a CEO to turn around the company. First of all, what I did is I changed the culture of one team, changed the culture of innovation, and delighted our customers, a deeply partnership with the customer to find a solution. In addition to growing our core EDA business, I also decided IP is very important through multiple acquisitions. I basically put the cash we have, I bought Denali, some of you may be familiar, and I bought Tensilica, and I bought Nu Semi for high-speed SerDes.
That is critical. That will help accelerate our design process, and it grew to more than 10% revenue. I always like to see where is the other 10% growth that we can see by new innovation and new areas that we can move in. We moved also aggressively into System design enablement. That is our system modeling, system analysis, that expands our addressable market and creates a new revenue stream. All this transformed the company from low single-digit growth to double-digit growth. I went from having no new organic development culture in the roadmap to have every year 12-14 new products organically developed rather than buying from outside. We grew our addressable market three times and delivered 3,200% in shareholder return. That reached out to almost $75 billion market cap.
Most important, we became the trusted partner to customers that they knew they could count on us. Overall, this experience taught me a lot. My time at Walden trained me to how to build companies from startup with small team and focus and address what company needs. My time at Cadence CEO helped me to understand design methodology, foundry ecosystem, and what it takes to delight customers. I also spent two years at the Intel board, and I learned a lot from our engineers about our problems, the challenges we faced, and how to fix them. All these have prepared me well on taking on this very challenging task to build a new Intel. This is an iconic and essential company that is important to the industry and also to the United States.
I care deeply about Intel's success and have many mentors from Intel over the years who inspire me. Some of you may remember Albert Yu. Some of you may remember Sean Maloney. Some of them, you may know Dadi Perlmutter. They are very close friends of mine. I learned a lot about the semiconductor industry from all these mentors of mine. Some of the people asking me, "Lip-Bu, why take on this job now at this stage in your career?" The answer is very simple. I love this company. It was very hard for me to watch its struggle. I simply cannot stay on the sideline knowing that I could help turn things around. I also fully recognize it won't be easy. It has been a tough period for quite a long time for Intel. We fell behind on innovation.
As a result, we have been too slow to adapt and to meet your needs. You deserve better, and we need to improve, and we will. Please be brutally honest with us. This is what I expect you this week. I believe harsh feedback is most valuable. I learned a lot from customers. When you give me honest feedback, then I need to know what to do. I learned the lesson firsthand at Cadence Design. When I took over during my initial one major customer review, I asked them to grade my products. The executives said, "Lip-Bu, none of the vendors would even dare to ask this question." I said, "I got to know how bad my product is." That is why information we got a lot of D, a lot of E, and many F. That is humiliating. I learned a lot.
Because in my career in academic, I never got anything below B. It's humiliating. It's really ignited me to change. That's a turning point for the company. We will reinvent how we engage with the customers. It began today. I'm really looking forward to building trust with you. I have competitors in the past tell me, "Lip-Bu, customers treat us as their vendor, but they treat you as a true partner." At Intel, I would love to expect you to do the same to me. I won't be rest until I see the same way. It starts with the culture. We have to foster inside the company the culture change. The most important and valuable lesson I learned in college besides the classroom and research labs, it was a basketball court. I used to play power forward in Singapore for my college.
I learned a lot. Teams win championships, even though sometimes I scored 38 points. It's not individuals. It's really finally we won the championship. I found my teammates that can shoot three-pointers. That helped me to kind of inside, outside, and we win. We work hard every day after school. We fight to win every game and learn from our mistakes and always ask, "How can we make the difference?" We review it, the video, and how to improve that. Just like some of you know that I'm a big Warrior fan. I love the game. I really enjoy the teamwork, how they pass the ball without even looking at it. You know your teammate is the other side to receive it. This is the kind of team I would like to build at Intel.
Most important, we need to strive every day to extend your dream, fully dedicate to your success. To make that happen, we are going to refocus the company on essential ingredients of innovation. Clearly, I need to focus on strengthening my balance sheet. I need to really drive efficiency. I need to really regroup the talent we have and attract some of the new talent with a clear vision of what we are going to do. Innovation starts with incubation. We are a big company. Sometimes we prevent new ideas from having room to develop and grow. I like to really practice the startup day-one culture. We are going to work as a day-one startup and a big startup. We are going to really drive some new ideas, giving engineers freedom to innovate from within.
My weekend is usually packed with a lot of engineers and architects. They have some brilliant ideas. They want to change the world. That is where I get excited to work closely with them. I will also put resources behind people and ideas where we can see the opportunity to innovate. We can free some of this infrastructure to really drive innovation and empower them. Most importantly, we will simplify the way we work. Bureaucratically, we kill innovation. In my career, I see how small, focused teams can move very fast and innovate and take on incumbents. We are going to practice that in Intel. We may not be perfect in the beginning, but eventually, you can count on it. I will make it perfect. This will unleash the potential I know exists across my team. It will also help us attract new talent from outside.
They can join us and enter this most exciting period of creating innovation and creating the new Intel. Some of you know my email address. If you're interested, call me. I will spend time with you. We are operating in a very dynamic, fast-moving industry. Technology adoption and disruption are accelerating faster than ever. This is being driven by the one transformational force called AI. AI is not new. With all the data, massive data available, you can really drive some of the new ways of learning, new ways of interpreting, and new ways to even forecast the future. This is really reshaping many of the companies I'm involved in and shaping our daily life. Can you imagine the agent helping you to decide and move some of the mundane processes? I love agents. Some of them are using it.
For the starter, AI is driving a total architectural change to the computing, especially in the cloud computing. No code, low code, the Software 2.0 data I will talk about. This is driving the hyperscale innovation, massive computational power, and new data capacity. This will accelerate us to move forward. Some of the infrastructure, as I mentioned earlier, moves into the photonics area. Also, I have invested in three quantum computing companies. This is coming. I keep a very close eye. It will come sooner than we all thought. AI is also revolutionizing how we discover, create, and interact with contents to generate AI and intelligent agents. Some of my friends, they are really working on to become the control center of all the AIs.
Some of them are talking to me, "Lip-Bu, we would love to have an Intel computer platform that we can base on and build all these killer apps and agents." I love it. As I think, can I come to your house to talk about that? AI is also expanding into the physical world. You may have heard of humanoid robotics. I'm a very big fan of that. This is a new frontier. It will redefine industries from auto to manufacturing. It will create a new era of robotics and intelligent systems embedded everywhere around us. I have a lot of experience in these two areas. Stay tuned from the Intel perspective. They will create great opportunities for us going forward. At Intel, we will redefine some of our strategy and then free up the bandwidth.
Some of the non-core business, we will spin it off, but really focus on our core business and how to expand that using AI and Software 2.0. It will require a foundation shift in how we approach product design. In the past, Intel's approach has been inside-out. We design hardware, then you figure out developing the software to make it work. The world has changed. You have to flip that around. Going forward, we will start with the problem: what are you trying to solve? And the workloads you need to handle and enable. We work backward from that. That requires embracing the Software 2.0 mentality, which means that having software-first designer mindset. I invest quite a few in the Software 2.0 startup. Some will be really exciting and game-changing. We will use AI-driven system design to accelerate the development of new compute architecture platforms.
I know from my time running Cadence that we adopted AI and drove significant performance and power efficiency at more than double digits. You can see a game change in how to help customers to be more productive in their design. It will also help us to enable new compute-intensive models and applications and agents that we are going to enjoy in the years to come. All of these will fundamentally reshape our approach to the hardware. The world is moving forward to power purpose-built silicon that designs and optimizes for specific workloads that you try to address. It opens the door for the new x86 solutions. I also believe we can play an important role in developing custom silicon that's tailored for specific applications that you need to enable. Last weekend, I spent quite a bit of time with three major data and AI platforms.
They love to work with us in terms of defining the next x86 solutions. I was fascinated and very excited about the opportunity. We have already started a deep dive with my engineering team to kickstart this transformation. We will begin reimagining our portfolio. At the same time, I am equally focused on our immediate priority, both products and foundry. Let me talk about that. Let's start with products. I am a big believer the best product always wins. The team began to refocus here last year. It will remain a top priority for us going forward. There are a few areas that are non-negotiable for me. First, we have to deliver the great performance that is essential to enable your workload of the future. We have to anticipate the future. We must deliver great efficiency essential to enable AI in the increasing power constraints world.
The power today, we have no way to even meet the AI cloud infrastructure we try to build. That's something that I pay a lot of attention. That's the main reason I rejoined MIT Advisory Board because of my nuclear engineering. They said, "Lip-Bu, the future is fusion and nuclear." And Lip-Bu, please come back and help us. I am delighted to be a part of that brainstorming future. We must deliver good quality, on-time delivery without exception. We have to have a culture of first-time pass. We're not there. I will implement that. Stay tuned. This is something that is non-negotiable for me because it's an essential part of earning customer trust. Those are the notes to us. It will take time. We start from today. Since I think the data is done.
Michelle and the team will give you a deep dive tomorrow morning. Today, I will just highlight a few specific priorities that I see. In client computing, we will drive strong innovation. That is a long-standing area of strength. Competition has increased. They changed the workload. We cannot be standstill. We have to move forward to meet those requirements. It will continue to strengthen our product and roadmap. We are also looking forward to shipping Panther Lake on 18A later this year. We also remain focused on building the industry's broadest ecosystem of ISV and application, AI application. We will leverage our capabilities in clients to help enable the AI edge. That is the next frontier. In data center, we need to strengthen our offering. We lost quite a bit of talent.
That's my top priority, to recruit some of the best talent in the industry to come back and then to rejoin or join Intel. You have told me we need greater performance and efficiency and also lower your total cost of ownership, especially your scale, your AI investment. Our latest Xeon portfolio is a step forward to enhance our competitiveness. We will work to drive continued improvement as CPU will play an increasingly important role in AI inferencing with low power, efficient power. In the broader AI data area, I'm not happy with our current position. I know that you are not happy either. I have heard the feedback loud and clear. It's time to turn the new page. We are going to learn to write the lesson from the past mistakes and work towards a competitive system that we can provide you. It won't happen overnight.
I know we can get there. As we strengthen our Intel products, I'm equally committed to build the great foundry. Global demand for chip production is growing. You need supply chains that are flexible, resilient, and secure. Intel Foundry plays a crucial role. We will continue to advance our foundry strategy to meet our needs. I have a weekly update from my team leaders. I go down to the week on the engineering side. How can we improve our process technology? I will keep you posted. You have to satisfy my requirement. I have a very high bar. I'm working directly with my team and understanding where we are and defining a clear path going forward, including clearly strengthening my balance sheet to drive more efficiency, put the right people in the right place, and to scale the business.
Foundry is a service business. That is built on the foundational principle of trust. That is very important. Also realize that every foundry customer has their own unique design methodology and style of design. That part, I learned a lot from my Cadence day. This is something that we need to learn and how to adopt each different customer. They all have their preferred IP vendors and their preferred EDA partners. To optimize the performance, quality, and yield. We're not going to change that. We're going to listen to the customer and focus on which pattern recognition, which EDA player, which IP they use. We optimize and drive the performance, the yield that they need. This is an ecosystem I know extremely well. I'm leaning in to help advance our goals.
We'll continue to advance our 18A as well, our future node 14A. 18A is set to win high-volume production in the second half this year with Panther Lake. That is our own requirement. We need to have that. I laser-focused, weekly review that. Also approaching our first external tape-out. We're going to be planning to do that. It will continue the improvement with yield, quality, and customer service to move our foundry business forward. It will take some time. I'm very patient. I always like to build business for the long- term to build a successful model. Very important for me, you need two or three very important customers. They're going to help us to drive the performance and yield. I know these few customers very well. I will depend on them to help us and then to really improve over time.
We are the only American company that designs and manufactures advanced chips. That means that we have an essential role. We are called to play the foundry ecosystem, especially in the U.S. I have been very pleased to see the Trump administration focus on strengthening American technology and manufacturing leadership. I am looking forward. They are asking me, "What can we help?" I will come to get your help to do what we need to do. I am looking forward to work closely with them to advance these shared goals. I will talk more about the Intel Foundry at our Direct Connect event at the end of April. Hope many of you will join us then. Whether the foundry or the product, our priority is the same. We are here to serve you and earn your trust.
I won't be happy and satisfied until we consistently deliver our promise on time, on quality to exceed your expectations. We have to earn it. We know that. We're deeply committed to the journey. I personally am committed to this journey. People asked me when I was at Cadence, "How long will you be there?" I told them, "I will be there as long as the company needs." Even though the board asked me just to do three months, I stayed on 15 years to make sure that we really deliver and delight customers. People asked me, "Why on earth do you take on this challenging job?" I committed the long- term. Again, the answer people asked me, "How long will you be at Intel?" I'll be here as long as the company needs. I am deeply committed to this journey.
Under my leadership, we will return our roots into an engineering-first company and follow the footsteps that I learned so much from Albert Yu and Dadi Perlmutter. It will start acting like a startup day one again. We will listen closely and act on your input. Most importantly, we will create a product and then solve the problem and drive your success. With humility, I urge you to help me. I can't do it alone. I need your help as a customer. Give me honest feedback. Many people know I don't have a high ego to just meet with another CEO. I go down to the six, seven-layer-down engineers to get your feedback. Stay tuned. You will see me a lot. That is the moment you demand from us and what we deserve from us.
With that, I just want to wish all of you have a wonderful Intel Vision. There are a lot of tracks you can go to. There are a lot of networking, social events. Just building the networking is fantastic. All the best. I wish you all enjoy that. Thank you so much.