Who have joined us to the 2019 Intel annual meeting. I will now call this meeting to order. On my right, I'm joined by Bob Swan, the Chief Executive Officer of Intel, and on my left, Patrick Bombach, who is acting as Corporate Secretary for this meeting. You will find the agenda on the portal. Before we get started, I will have some logistics about the meeting. Patrick and I will conduct the formal portion of the meeting, followed by Bob, who will provide a business update, then we will address stakeholder questions. Patrick will record the minutes of the meeting. As you know, this is a virtual meeting where we invite all stockholders, also welcome non-stockholders to view the meeting.
In order for stockholders to have the broadest possible access to questions, we opened the portal for questions over a month ago, we will take questions live during the meeting. Any stockholder who has a question, type it into the submit a question box, then hit Click to Submit. During the question and answer session, we will be answering both questions submitted to us before the meeting and during the meeting. Please limit yourself to one question for broadest access. Know that we are committed to answering all questions. If we do not get to a specific question during the meeting, we will post the answer on the Intel website to make sure that, again, all questions are answered by us. I will now turn the meeting over to Patrick to begin the formal part of the meeting.
Thank you, Andy. Good morning. We have an affidavit from Broadridge certifying the stockholders of record as of March 18th, 2019. The affidavit of mailing and notice will be filed with the minutes of this meeting. Mr. Jim Alden of American Election Services, who has already taken his oath of office, will be serving as Inspector of Elections for today's meeting. As of the record date, March 18th, 2019, we had 4.5 billion shares outstanding that are available to vote. Mr. Alden has confirmed that we have 87% of those shares by proxy, which constitutes a quorum. Therefore, the meeting is duly constituted and we may proceed with business. Please be reminded that some of today's content, including Bob's business update, contain forward-looking statements.
All statements made during the annual meeting that are not historical facts are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially. Please refer to our recent Q1 earnings release, our Form 10-K, our most recent Form 10-Q for more information on the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ. If we use any non-GAAP financial measures during the presentations, you will find on our website, intc.com, the required reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure. The polls are now open for voting for those who have not voted. The polls will remain open until the beginning of our CEO's presentation or 8:45 A.M., whichever is later. If you previously voted by the internet, phone, or mail, you do not need to take any additional action.
If you previously voted and wish to change your vote, please do so before the closing of the polls by using the voting buttons on the portal. After the polls close, we will announce the preliminary results of the votes. I will turn it back over to Andy to introduce our directors and present our first two proposals.
Thank you, Patrick. I would like to now introduce our independent board members who are joining us here at the studio or via the telephone. First, Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO of Workday. Dr. Omar Ishrak, Chairman and CEO of Medtronic. Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, a professor at University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Tsu-Jae King Liu, Dean and Professor of College of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. Greg Smith, Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of Enterprise Performance and Strategy at Boeing, and Frank Yeary, Managing Member, Darwin Capital Advisors. Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts, and Reed Hundt, Principal, REH Advisors, could not attend today's meeting. I will now turn to our first proposal, which is to elect 10 directors to Intel's board.
The nominees to the board are Aneel Bhusri, Reed Hundt, Dr. Omar Ishrak, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Dr. Tsu-Jae King Liu, Greg Smith, Bob Swan, Andrew Wilson, Frank Yeary, and me, Andy Bryant. The second matter today is ratification of the selection of Ernst & Young as Intel's independent auditors for 2019. Jeff Lang, a senior partner of our audit team from Ernst & Young, is here today and available to answer questions during the question and answer session. I will now turn it over to Patrick to present the remaining proposals.
Thank you, Andy. The third item on the agenda is an advisory vote to approve executive compensation, also known as Say on Pay. We are asking stockholders to approve on an advisory basis the compensation of Intel's listed officers as described in detail in the proxy statement. We believe that our compensation programs operate in the best interest of our stockholders. While this is an advisory vote to approve executive compensation, the board and the compensation committee will carefully assess the voting results and will consult directly with stockholders to better understand any issues or concerns raised through the stockholder vote. The fourth item on the agenda is the approval of the amendment and restatement of the 2006 Equity Incentive Plan.
We are asking stockholders to vote in favor of the amendment of the equity incentive plan as described in detail in the proxy statement. The board believes that our equity incentive plan is in the best interest of stockholders and Intel, as equity awards granted under the plan help to attract, motivate, and retain talented employees and directors. This year, we are requesting an extension of the plan for an additional three years, which is a more common duration but still allows for frequent stockholder review. The final three agenda items today are votes on three stockholder proposals. The first stockholder proposal on whether to allow stockholders to act by written consent was submitted by Mr. John Chevedden. Mr. Chevedden or his representative will be presenting the proposal.
Hello, this is John Chevedden.
Mr. Chevedden, we would like to offer you five minutes to present your proposal.
I just want to tell you there's a problem. I'm getting an echo on this line, and plus, I can't view the meeting on the computer. I don't know what kind of a meeting. It's not a good sign for a virtual meeting. All I can see on the computer is PowerPoints. Has anyone alerted you to that issue?
No, they have not.
Hello?
No, they have not.
Mr. Chevedden.
There seems to be a date delay also. This is proposal five, shareholder right to act by written consent. Shareholders request that our board of directors take the necessary steps to permit written consent by shareholders entitled to cast the minimum number of votes that would be necessary to authorize an action at a meeting at which all shareholders entitled to vote thereon were present and voting. This proposal topic won majority shareholder support at 13 major companies in a single year. This included 67% support at both Allstate and Sprint. Hundreds of major companies enable shareholder action by written consent. This proposal topic also won impressive 42% support at the 2016 Intel annual meeting. This 42% vote might have been above 50% if more shareholders had access to independent proxy voting advice.
This proposal deserves added attention at Intel, because Intel shareholders do not have the full right to call a special meeting that's available under state law. It is especially important to open up a new avenue of communication with the board of directors, such as written consent, after the board shut down the long-established in-person annual meeting avenue of communication with shareholders, without even allowing shareholders to vote on such a downsizing of shareholder rights. We now have a virtual annual meeting, which means that virtually any shareholder question can be avoided. Any question that is not screened out can simply be given a vague answer with no shareholder opportunity to seek clarification. Taking away our right to an in-person annual meeting sends a message that management considers in-person contact with shareholders a nuisance.
An obligation for management to explain management's successes and failures during the past year before a live audience is a powerful incentive plan for good management. Intel is now depriving its shareholders of the benefits of an important management incentive. A board of directors that does not need to attend a real annual meeting can be inclined to think that management walks on water, but this is not borne out. For instance, a recent article said Intel disappointed investors with long-term financial projections. Intel remains on a path of losing technological leadership. The financial projections now appear aggressive to analysts following the abandonment of the 5G modem business. There was also $10 billion in stock buybacks. Stock buybacks can be a sign of short-termism for executives, sometimes boosting share price without boosting the underlying value, profitability, or ingenuity of the company.
In spite of stock buybacks, the price of our stock is down from $55 to $45 in the past year. Please vote yes to open an important new avenue of shareholder communication. Shareholder right to act by written consent, proposal 5.
Thank you, Mr. Chevedden. We recognize the importance of stockholder rights, and based on a careful review of the proposal and the company's current governance practices, we believe the implementation of the proposal is unnecessary and contrary to the best interests of the stockholders. Please refer to the 2019 Intel proxy statement for the board's full views on this proposal. Thank you, Mr. Chevedden. We appreciate you joining us today. The second stockholder proposal, requesting a report on the risks associated with emerging public policies addressing the gender pay gap, was submitted by Arjuna Capital on behalf of Ms. Laura Ballance and Mr. Lucas Joseph Sewer. Their representative, Natasha Lamb, will be presenting the proposal. Ms. Lamb, we would like to offer you five minutes to present your proposal.
Good morning. Thank you. My name is Natasha Lamb, and I move proposal number six on behalf of Arjuna Capital, asking for a report on gender and racial pay equity. Arjuna Capital first engaged Intel on pay equity in 2016. We've been encouraged by the progress so far. Our company has taken a critical first step by publishing statistically adjusted equal pay for equal work numbers, assessing the pay of men and women performing similar jobs, and the pay of minorities and non-minorities performing similar jobs. Intel reports women and minorities earn 100% of the compensation received by men and non-minorities on this basis. This statistically adjusted number is only half the story. The other half is median pay disclosure, which is the objective of this proposal.
Median pay is an unadjusted raw measure used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, to assess not only equal pay, but equal opportunity. Women who work full-time in the U.S. make $0.80 on the dollar versus men on this basis, African American women make $0.60 on the dollar, Latina women make $0.55 on the dollar. Gaps in median pay is literally the definition of the gender pay gap. While adjusted equal pay gaps measure whether women and people of color are paid commensurate with their peers for the work that they're doing today, median pay gaps measure whether these groups are holding as many high-paying jobs within companies. Given the importance of this measure, disclosure of median pay is now mandated in the U.K.
For Intel's U.K. operations, our company reported a 33% median hourly pay gap and a 45% median bonus pay gap. Notably, our company has not published median information for its global operations. In the company's opposition statement, Intel asserts that disclosure of median pay data is "unnecessary and impractical," despite illustrating the practicality of disclosing in the U.K. for two years. Our company also seeks to narrowly define pay equity as simply gaps between employees in similar roles. While that is a more flattering definition, it is not the whole story. Transparent disclosures that tell the whole story of gender and racial pay equity are essential to investors as they create accountability and drive change. That change is in service to a more diverse company and leadership, therefore better performance. Thank you so much for your time and attention.
Thank you, Ms. Lamb. We recognize the importance of gender pay equity and are committed to fairly and equitably compensating all of our employees, as discussed in our annual corporate responsibility reports. As announced in January, Intel achieved gender pay equity across our worldwide workforce. We believe the implementation of the proposal is unnecessary and contrary to the best interests of stockholders. Please refer to the 2019 Intel proxy statement for the board's full views on this proposal. We appreciate you joining us today. The last proposal item is a stockholder proposal requesting an annual advisory vote on political contributions submitted by NorthStar Asset Management Funded Pension Plan. Its representative, Ms. Mari Schwartzer, will be presenting the proposal. Ms. Schwartzer, we would like to offer you five minutes to present your proposal.
Thank you. Good morning, fellow shareholders. My name is Mari Schwartzer from NorthStar Asset Management in Boston. I am here to ask for shareholder support of resolution number seven regarding our company’s political contributions. Each year, our company and its Political Action Committee, IPAC, make contributions to political candidates that support or try to defeat legislation that affect our company and our employees. Our company policies state that Intel reviews historical voting records and positions related to key strategic issues for Intel. However, recent concerns about candidates receiving Intel or IPAC contributions indicate that Intel’s process may be inadequate to support Intel’s objectives and the company’s stated values.
For example, in 2018, the Intel Political Action Committee made a contribution to Iowa Representative Steve King, despite his statements that have been widely criticized as supporting racists, promoting hatred of immigrants and ethnic groups, and ridiculing an outspoken mass shooting survivor and gun control advocate. Representative King’s beliefs on these matters are clear and easily identifiable through minimal online research. Yet Intel made a contribution anyway, and news reports indicate that Intel may only have discovered the problem with this contribution when an employee brought Representative King’s public statements to our company’s attention. In another example, our 10-K discusses the risks to our business of climate change, yet our Political Action Committee has supported dozens of political candidates who purport that climate change does not even exist.
Many of these politicians pursue legislation that undermines actions taken by our company to do our part in limiting climate change and to protect our business. Political contributions, especially those that are misaligned, may bring risks to our company. One of the biggest examples of such a misstep came when Target Corporation donated $150,000 to a political group that backed pro-business candidates in statewide races, including a candidate for governor that opposed same-sex marriage. The organization’s director at the time stated that "His group picked candidates based on their fiscal, not social, positions." Yet it was those so-called social positions that harmed Target’s brand name and consumer trust because of the beliefs and company values that Target had put forth, which contrasted with the candidates’ actions. Hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside Target stores, and a petition promising a boycott was signed by over 240,000 people.
We do not want the same fate for our company. Our proposal today offers an opportunity for shareholders to gain confidence that our company’s oversight procedures of political contributions are robust and protective of shareholder value, and to offer shareholder oversight on these crucial decisions made in company name. For these reasons, fellow shareholders, we ask for your support on proposal number seven. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Schwartzer. We take the issue of political accountability seriously and are committed to transparency around our contributions disclosure. We also continued to take actions over the past year to further strengthen our review process based on stakeholder feedback. Please refer to the 2019 Intel proxy statement for the board's full views on this proposal. We appreciate you joining us today. Because it is now past 8:45 A.M., the polls are now closed. Next, Bob will present a business update.
Thank you, Patrick, and thank you, Andy, and welcome to our shareholders that were able to join us today. It's wonderful to have the chance to connect with you. In my short talk, I want to really touch on three key things that we think are important. First, over the last several years, we have dramatically expanded our TAM, leveraging our core competencies and taking advantage of a world where the insatiable appetite for data provides us more significant opportunities in the role that we can play in the success of our customers. As such, today, we are pursuing the largest TAM in our company's history, and we see significant opportunities for growth. Secondly, we continue to invest in extending our product leadership advantage from world-class CPUs to more and more architectures that we think will play a bigger and bigger role in this increasingly data-centric world.
Third, our ambitions are big, and we expect to play a bigger and bigger role in our customers' success. Therefore, we know to play that larger role, that we need to improve our execution, to accelerate our rate of innovation, and to evolve our very special culture. We're in the middle of a journey, and our ambitions over the last several years is to evolve from a PC-centric company to a data-centric company, to a company whose technologies power the world. In 2013, over 70% of our revenue, of our profitability, of our cash flows, and the source of funds for our IP, and what filled the fab was our PC business. At the same time, that market was declining, and the demands for data were growing exponentially.
Over the last five years, we've invested significantly into what we call our collection of data-centric businesses to take advantage of the increased demand for compute, for storage, and for processing capabilities. In 2018, our progress, we had roughly 50% of our revenues now coming from this collection of data-centric businesses as they drove the growth of the company. As we go forward, we see the opportunities getting even bigger, evolving from a microprocessor inside a PC to lots of Intel and technology inside of billions of connected devices around the world. Our ambitions are relatively big. As we think about the future, we think we have an opportunity to lead one of the most successful transformations in corporate history. Again, from a microprocessor inside a PC to lots of technologies inside lots and lots of devices. That's what we behind.
At the same time, we know that it won't be easy. Our customers' demands are as great as ever, the competitive environment as intense as ever, and the geopolitical dynamics are creating challenges for global trade around the world. Our ambitions are big, and our focus is on capitalizing on the significant opportunities we see, at the same time, while managing the inherent risk of operating a global company in a constantly changing environment. Our strategy is relatively simple. Continue to make the world's best semiconductors, to lead the key technology inflections that are driving increased demand for data, artificial intelligence, 5G, and the autonomous revolution. By being the leading end-to-end platform provider for the new data world, by bringing together our hardware and our software to deliver not just product, but to deliver solutions for our customers. Four, continue to be relentlessly focused on operational excellence and efficiency.
Fifth, continue to hire, develop, and retain the best, most diverse, and inclusive talent in the industry. From a historical perspective, our company made tremendous progress at getting a larger and larger share of the CPU market. In 2018, we had over 90% market share of a relatively small TAM of $52 billion. Our strategies and our opportunities that we see are to play a much bigger opportunity in an evolving industry with a much larger TAM and more significant opportunity to grow. Today, we have roughly a $300 billion TAM, and we're well-positioned in the higher growth segments of the market in what we refer to as a data-centric opportunity. The core at what we do continues to be our world-class CPUs. That is the baseline of what we provide to our customers.
There are increased demands in the data center environment, in the network, at the edge, in the Internet of Things, provide more and more opportunities to expand our product portfolio to play a bigger and bigger role in the success of those customers. In the data-centric environment and in the PC-centric environment, the opportunities we have are significant. To take advantage of those opportunities, our game plan is to continue to extend our product leadership with workload-optimized platforms, allowing customers and developers effortless access to our advanced innovation. We talk about it in the context of product leadership in the future will come from six key technological pillars, process and packaging leadership, XPU architectures beyond the CPU to new architectures to be able to process the growing and changing demands of workloads in our customers' environments. The role of memory continues to grow.
Interconnect across CPUs and servers becomes more and more important. Our pledge on security is to lead in an increasingly challenging world, and the role that software plays gets bigger and bigger. To capitalize on our opportunities, we are investing in extending our product leadership position in a way that we believe Intel is uniquely positioned to do. Product leadership is what we're focused on, but it means that we need to continue to invest in process leadership. In 2018 and 2019, we're investing across three nodes, the 14 nm node to build the capacity to support our customers' growth, the 10 nm node as we ramp to have systems on shelf for our customers for the holiday season in 2019 and for the server market in the first half of 2020.
We announced last week that we're accelerating 7 nm, that we intend to productize and launch in 2021. Product leadership is critical. Process leadership and packaging technologies are key components of bringing that product leadership to life. We also realize that to take advantage of our opportunities, we need to evolve our culture and to improve our execution. Today, we no longer play a 90% share position for our customers, but a 30% market share position with real opportunities to grow, and as I indicated before, an increased competitive environment. What that means for us is we need to continue to evolve, to be incredibly customer obsessed in all that we do by bringing together the collective capabilities of 107,000 people strong Intel workforce to act as one in serving those customers. In this expanded market, to be prepared to take risk and be fearless as we make investments.
If those investments don't pay off, we leverage the experience and the failures to make ourselves stronger and better for the next opportunity that comes down. Last but not least, truth and transparency in all that we do with a free flow of information to all of our constituents so we can move faster and faster and accelerate the pace in which we innovate. Around all four of those key pillars of evolving our culture is something that is very critical to our company, and that is diversity and inclusion. We've made tremendous progress on this front. It's a key aspect of improving our execution, and we'll continue to invest so that we have the most diverse and inclusive workforce in the industry.
Corporate responsibility has always been very important to this company, whether it's sustainable and efficient operations or 4 billion kilowatts of energy saved since 2012. It's innovative and inclusive talent. We achieved our goals two years early to have a fully representative workforce here in the U.S., and to be ethical and responsible culture in everything that we do, having met nine years in a row on Ethisphere's list of the world's most ethical companies. Corporate responsibility has and will be critical to our success going forward. We talked to our investors last week at our investor day, what we said what they could expect, what you could expect from us over the course of the next three years, is we would grow our revenue in the low single digits or deliver $76 billion-$78 billion in 2021.
Our data-centric businesses continue to grow in the high single-digit area and our PC-centric businesses, we expect to be flat to down over this timeframe. We'll continue to operate efficiently. We expect our operating margins over the three-year timeframe to be roughly 32%, flat with our outlook for 2019. During this timeframe, as we expand our TAM and innovate with process technology, we expect our gross margins will decline, but it'll be offset by spending leverage in our previously announced intention to exit the 5G smartphone modem business. Third, earnings and free cash flow. We expect earnings over the three-year timeframe to grow in line with revenue and our free cash flow to grow faster than earnings.
Over this timeframe, you can expect us to close the gap between free cash flow and earnings and to continue our track record of attractive capital returns with a dividend that grows in lines with our non-GAAP earnings and opportunistic share repurchases over time. Just in wrapping up, we see our opportunities with a much broader TAM to expand the role we play in our customers' success. We continue to invest in our product leadership position and expand the role we play in the key technology inflections we see occurring over the horizon. Last, to take advantage of our larger and larger opportunity, we need to improve our execution and evolve our culture, and that is exactly what we're doing. Thanks for your time today. I'll now turn it back over to Andy so we can answer your questions.
Thanks, Bob. We will now proceed with the question and answer session, where we will answer previously submitted questions as well as questions submitted on the web during today's meeting. We will direct the question to the person we think is the most appropriate to respond to the question. The first question comes from a pre-meeting submission from a stockholder. Question is: how will Intel deliver on our strategy and revenue commitments as it continues to reduce spending? That one's for Bob.
Thank you, Andy, and thanks for the question. As I indicated, we see the opportunities for our business to play a bigger and bigger role in our customers' success to be as large as they've ever been. We're investing behind that opportunity. We're investing efficiently and we're investing wisely. If you look over the course of the last three years, our spending as a percentage of revenue has gone from 36% to 28%. During that timeframe, we also increased our amount of R&D by over $1 billion. We've done that by investing in the areas that have stronger prospects for growth, and with that growth, leveraging our existing infrastructure such that all dollars of spending do not have to grow in line with revenue.
We're going to continue to invest in the opportunities that we see, but at the same time, we're going to be very diligent in how we do those investments.
Next question. How much in stock buybacks are planned for next year? For that, let's have Bob expand it beyond just a stock buyback question. Let's talk about capital allocation philosophy.
Yeah. If you think about our three priorities on capital allocation, I'd list these in order of importance. First, to continue to invest in the R&D and the capital required to allow us to grow our business. Second, we look for acquisitions that can add critical IP or critical technology gaps and/or expand the TAM that we see an opportunity to serve. Third, we use our strong balance sheet and our cash flows to continue to deliver attractive capital returns to our shareholders through a combination of a dividend that we continue to expect to grow in line with non-GAAP earnings growth. We continue to use our cash flows to offset the impact of our compensation-based programs by keeping our share count flat.
Third, we evaluate how we trade relative to what we believe is the intrinsic value of the company, and use our capital opportunistically to reduce the outstanding float of the company. How much we'll spend in 2019 is always a reflection of how we're trading relative to what we believe is the intrinsic value of the company. If you think about over the course of the last 10 years, we have returned through capital returns, combination of dividend and share repurchases, roughly 100% of our free cash flow. Each year, each quarter, we look at these three priorities around capital allocation and make the decisions that we think have the best short, medium, and long-term returns for our shareholders.
For record-keeping, the last question was actually a live question. I would now like to go to another question from the pre-submitted questions. Can we give me that question, please? Question, why are there not more women in executive positions or on the board, in management or the board? I believe that Intel is short-changing itself and thereby the shareholders, by not having a representative share of women directing the company. How will we change this? For the board question, I would go to Frank Yeary, who's co-chairman of Nominating and Governance. Frank, are you on the line?
Yes, I am, Andy.
Can you take the question on the board, please?
I'm happy to. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to answer the question. With respect to board diversity, our board believes that diversity of experiences and thought are a key asset in the boardroom, and we're committed to actively seeking quality women and minority director candidates for consideration to the board. In fact, since 2016, Intel's welcomed five new independent directors, including two women, to our board. Last year, Intel also joined the 30% Coalition, which focuses on strategies to increase female representation on corporate boards. Through our participation in this partnership, we aim to not only increase the available talent for our board, but to also support increased female board representation more broadly.
Thank you, Frank. Bob, would you take the one on the executive management?
Yes. First, I would say, to follow up on Frank's comments, diversity and inclusion are extremely important to this company, and they're extremely important to me. While I think we've made wonderful progress along the way, we still see opportunities to improve going forward. We met our full representation goals last year, two years ahead of our plan, we feel very good about the progress we've made. If you think about women in leadership since 2015, 2016 timeframe, we've gone from roughly 17.7% at that time to just a little under 21% last year.
We continue to make good progress, as I indicated, we still have room for improvement, we continue to invest in our women's network, the women's executive network, and the opportunity to work with and engage with our employee population to continue to advance diversity, inclusion, including female representation at the senior leadership of the company. Not just because it's the right thing to do, because we know that when we do it makes us more competitive and more better strategically positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that we have. We feel good about what we've done, we also know we have opportunities to improve.
Thank you, Bob. Next question comes live over the web. Intel is one of the top donors to Human Rights Campaign. HRC is perhaps the nation's leading opponent of religious liberty. Can you explain why Intel is funding anti-religious bigotry and opposing freedom of speech?
Yeah. It's Bob. I would just go back to my previous comments. We are committed to diversity and inclusion, our support of HRC is a part of that commitment. We support each employee's freedom of expression and the context of respect, empathy, and tolerance of fellow employees is critical. Our commitment to diversity and inclusion has HRC as a part of that commitment.
Next question was submitted in the pre-meeting timeframe. Given attempts to diversify outside the core IA business have not been successful, and Intel has fallen behind on delivering 10 nm, what is the board and management doing to ensure Intel architecture products are available to customers in a timely manner? Has the board considered splitting the company into two, manufacturing and products, to allow the product group to choose the best available process technology? Bob?
Yeah, just as I indicated in my prepared remarks, we see the expanded TAM and the opportunity that we can have in our customers' success today to be bigger than it has ever been. To take advantage of that opportunity, it requires us to deliver on the present, and deliver on the present means to ensure that we have the products available to meet our customers' demands, and we're investing in innovation like 10 nm so they can count on a continued flow of product innovation going forward. As I said, the way we think about the role we can play, from a product standpoint, is really across the six pillars of process leadership, expanding the architectures, evolving the role that memory plays to get more and more performance out of compute. Interconnect becomes increasingly important, security, and the role software plays.
When we think about the opportunities and the demands of our customers, we see a bigger and bigger role that we can play. At the core of that is what I'd call a core competency that's been a key part of this company for years, and that is the ability to have both integrated design and manufacturing under one roof, where the designers, the architects, and the process manufacturing people work as one to deliver this expanding set of architectures for our customers. That's been a key component of the success of the company in the past. I expect it to be a key component going forward. Along the way, we're always evaluating under the umbrella of doing the most effective and efficient things for our customers, how we need to adjust and adapt for opportunities as they arise.
A question from the web. While Intel is leading the market for 5G modems in smartphone, where competition is high and margins low, will the company pursue Intel inside opportunities for 5G infrastructure, both network centric and data centric?
I talked about three key technology inflections that we're investing behind because we believe they're at the core of meeting these insatiable appetite for data going forward. That includes artificial intelligence, that includes autonomous, and that includes 5G. 5G, in our minds, is this convergence of compute and communication networks where the dependency or the demands on networks in light of 5G are going to increase over time. We see the opportunity in that world to take the technologies and the IP that we've developed for the data-centric world and bring them into the network. Today, we look at that. I talked earlier about our TAM of roughly $300 billion.
The network environment, particularly given the transition to 5G, is almost $65 billion of that, and we see that as a unique opportunity for us to gain a market share position in what will be a faster-growing segment of the market, the network, driven by the adoption of 5G over time. It's very important to us, and we're going to continue to invest in it.
A question submitted earlier through the portal. Why are stockholders prevented from attending the actual meeting? This is the most important meeting for leadership to face their stockholders, and some stockholders prefer to meet in person, and some may not have the capability for a virtual meeting. First of all, let me say that Intel firmly believes in hearing from and talking to its stockholders. We have a very robust outreach program that's conducted through the year, to the owners of Intel stock. What we observed over the years were fewer and fewer stockholders were able to come to the actual meeting, and what we ended up with was a meeting that was targeted towards a small handful of people. By using a web-based approach, every stockholder can attend, every stockholder has equal access, and those who are not stockholders can view the meetings.
We consider it a positive, quite frankly, for most people. Do understand we are committed to answering your questions. As I said earlier, we will answer every question that's given to us in the time allotted. We will take the rest of the questions, and they will all be answered on the Intel web. We want to make sure we're connecting to investors. We want to make sure that we're responding to requests. Next question. What is Intel doing to address the environment and climate change in terms of, A, nullifying the negative effects of its operations on the planet and environment? B, as a corporate citizen supporting and lobbying for legislation that will help reduce carbon and pollution emissions, and C, doing what is necessary to plan for and remediate the effects of climate change on its business. Bob.
Yeah. First, I would say that we're very proud of the company's long history of commitment to environmental sustainability and the actions to address the risks of climate change. We invest in conservation projects and set company-wide environment targets seeking to drive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, water use, and waste generation. We're on track to meet our 2020 GHG and renewable energy goals, and 100% of the power that we use in the U.S. and the EU, and 71% of the power we use globally are from renewable sources. In 2018, we also continued to invest in water conservation projects and made progress toward our goal to restore 100%. I would say regarding your question on climate advocacy, we participate in a number of organizations to help build a supportive policy environment for private sector leadership on climate change.
One example is the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. Intel's climate change policy, which is, in fact, available on our website, outlines our approach. We are committed to transparency and disclosure on this issue, reporting our progress in our annual corporate responsibility report that we released this morning.
Another question that has come in live, what is Intel's strategy for artificial intelligence?
Well, this is one of those key technology inflections that in our mind is really a tide that's lifting out all boats because what it does in fact do is creates more and more data. We need the technology to make that abundance of data more and more relevant. We've been investing in AI in a variety of different architectures so we can continue to lead in this critical technology inflection. We believe AI is going to be everywhere, and therefore we need to build AI into everything that we do, whether that's into the CPU, whether that's into FPGAs, or whether that's into new ASICs. Building the technology into the products we have in discrete AI capabilities to meet changing workloads is a critical aspect for us and something that we are very centered on in our strategy and our investments.
Thank you, Bob. Thank you all for your questions. The question and answer session is now closed. Patrick, would you please provide the preliminary voting results?
Yes. Thank you, Andy. The final results will be available early next week. The preliminary results of the stockholder vote are: each board nominee received a vote of more than 96% of the shares voted, each nominee has been reelected. On the ratification of the selection of the company's independent auditors, approximately 96% of the shares voted were voted in favor of the proposal, the proposal is approved. On the advisory vote to approve executive compensation, approximately 60% of the shares voted were voted in favor of the proposal, the proposal is approved. On the approval of the amendment and restatement of the 2006 Equity Incentive Plan, approximately 95% of the shares voted were voted in favor of the proposal, the proposal is approved.
On the stockholder proposal recommending allowing stockholders the right to act by written consent, approximately 40% of the shares voted were voted in favor of the proposal, the proposal is not approved. On the stockholder proposal requesting a report on the risks associated with emerging public policies addressing the gender pay gap, approximately 29% of the shares voted were voted in favor of the proposal, the proposal is not approved. On the stockholder proposal requesting an annual advisory vote on political contributions, approximately 6% of the shares voted were voted in favor of the proposal, the proposal is not approved. Final vote tallies, including the ballot submitted today, will be posted on our website at intc.com and in an 8-K filing with the SEC within four business days. Now I turn it back to Andy.
Thanks, Patrick. As Patrick mentioned, we would like to direct your attention to Intel's investor relations website at intc.com. The website contains stock quotes, webcast events such as this meeting, and other investor information. On the website, you can sign up for electronic delivery of stockholder communications, such as the proxy statement and the annual report. Electronic delivery reduces the paper in your mailbox and reduces the company's expenses. Our agenda having been completed and the time adopted for the adjournment has arrived, I declare this meeting adjourned. On behalf of Intel, thank you for attending this year's annual stockholder meeting.