Good morning. I'm Andy Bryant, Chairman of the Board of Intel, and on behalf of the board and our management team, I would like to welcome our stockholders and others who have joined us for the 2017 Annual Meeting. On my right, I'm joined by Brian Krzanich, our CEO, and on my left, by Suzan Miller, Intel's Corporate Secretary, who goes by Sam. You will find today's agenda on the portal. First, some logistics before proceeding with the business of the meeting. Sam and I will conduct the formal portion of the meeting, and Sam will record the minutes. After that, Brian will provide an Intel business update, and then we will address stockholder questions. As you all know, this is a virtual meeting where we invite all stockholders to participate, and also welcome non-stockholders to view the meeting.
In order to provide our stockholders the broadest opportunity to ask questions, we have had the stockholder question portal open since April 6th. We will also take live questions during this meeting. Any stockholder who would like to ask a question can do so by typing their question in the ask a question box and clicking submit. During the Q&A session, we will be answering both questions submitted to us prior to and during the meeting. Please know that we are committed to answering your questions, and if you provide us with your email address, we will answer any questions that we are not able to address during the meeting due to time constraints. I will now turn it over to Sam to begin the formal part of the meeting.
Thank you, Andy. Good morning. We have an affidavit from Broadridge certifying that the stockholders of record as of March 20, 2017, were mailed notice of meeting and proxy materials on April 6, 2017. 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 May 18, 2017, we had 4.7 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. Some of today's content, including Brian'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, and actual results may differ materially. Please refer to our recent Q1 earnings release, our Form 10-K, and 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 measures. 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 via 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 turn it back over to Andy to introduce our directors and present the first two proposals.
Thanks, Sam. The first proposal is to elect 11 directors to Intel's board. The 11 nominees to the board are Aneel Bhusri, Co-founder and CEO of Workday, Reed Hundt, Principal, REH Advisors, Omar Ishrak, Chairman and CEO of Medtronic, Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, David Pottruck, Chairman and CEO of Red Eagle Ventures, Greg Smith, CFO and Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy of Boeing, Frank Yeary, Executive Chairman of CamberView Partners, David Yoffie, Professor at Harvard Business School, and me, Andy Bryant, your Chairman. The following two nominees could not attend today's meeting. Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, Senior International Partner at the law firm of WilmerHale, and Dr. Tsu-Jae King Liu, Distinguished Professor at Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
Before we move to the next agenda item, I would like to recognize Dr. James Plummer, who's retiring from our board today, and John Donahoe, who is not standing for re-election. On behalf of the entire board, I would like to thank Dr. Plummer for his approximately 12 years of service and Mr. Donahoe for his eight years of dedicated service. The second matter today is ratification of the selection of Ernst & Young as Intel's independent auditors for 2017. Jeff Lang, a Senior Partner of our audit team from Ernst & Young, is here today and is available to answer questions during the question-and-answer session. I will now turn it over to Sam to present the remaining proposals.
The third item on the agenda is an advisory vote to approve executive compensation, also known as say on pay. We're asking stockholders to approve, on an advisory basis, the compensation of Intel's listed officers as described in detail in the proxy statement. We have a long history of strong pay-for-performance alignment, and 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 result and will consult directly with stockholders to better understand any issues or concerns raised through the stockholder votes. The fourth item on our agenda is approval of an amendment and restatement to the 2006 Equity Incentive Plan, as described in the proxy statement, that would extend the plan for an additional two years to 2020.
If not approved, the 2006 Equity Incentive Plan will terminate in 2018. Intel has a long-standing practice of granting equity awards, not only to its executives and directors, but also broadly amongst its employees. In 2016, approximately 84% of Intel's employees received an equity award. The fifth item on our agenda is an advisory vote to approve the frequency of the say-on-pay vote. We are asking stockholders to vote on whether future say-on-pay votes, such as the one in proposal number three, should occur every year, every two years, or every three years. Our Board of Directors recommends that stockholders vote to conduct future advisory votes to approve executive compensation every year. The final agenda items today are votes on two stockholder proposals. The first stockholder proposal was 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.
My name is Mari Schwartzer from NorthStar Asset Management in Boston. NorthStar is the beneficial owner of almost $3.2 million of Intel common stock. I'm here to ask for shareholders' support of resolution number six regarding political contributions linked to our company. At the heart of this proposal is that whatever the company stands for should be represented in all arenas of the company's public activity, including political contributions. Shareholders want good governance, and we want to know that the management team overseeing political contributions is carefully vetting the endpoints of all money that is associated with the company. Unfortunately, we don't see such an examination. In fact, we came to an agreement with Intel in 2013, which would have put in place the examination and reporting that this proposal is requesting.
In the ensuing four years, not only has Intel never produced the report promised, which allowed us to withdraw that proposal, but the company PAC has continued to make contributions, which, in our opinion, undermine the company's goals, shareholder value, and our employees' rights. In those ensuing four years, Intel PAC has contributed to several politicians that we believe are working at cross purposes to Intel company values. For example, why did our PAC give to Mitch McConnell, an outspoken politician trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act? As a company committed to gender equality, why did our PAC, in the last two years, give to 28 representatives and nine senators who voted against the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act?
We, as shareholders, want to know why the Intel PAC made contributions in the last two years alone to at least three original co-sponsors of the Defense of Marriage Amendment, known as DOMA, which defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman, discriminating against each of our LGBT employees who sought to marry their same-sex partner. These contributions that we consider to be egregious misalignments with what the company stands for are easy to uncover. We believe that shareholder value, employee morale, and company brand name depend on management's being aware of these incongruities and being prepared for any critique. The 2010 Citizens United case opened the floodgates on corporate political contributions. Justice Stevens commented that, quote, "A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe that laws are being bought and sold." End quote.
When corporations are allowed to freely spend on electioneering with zero accountability to shareholders, our only recourse is to actively participate in corporate democracy. Without corporate democracy, company treasury and PAC contributions become just one more source of power that threatens to undermine our political system, just as Justice Stevens feared in his dissent. When Intel engages in behavior that is contrary to our company's own stated principles and values, then it is up to shareholders to take a stand. We ask that you vote for resolution number six. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Schwartzer. We take the issue of political accountability seriously and are committed to transparency around our contributions disclosure. Please refer to the 2017 Intel proxy statement for the board's views on this proposal. Ms. Schwartzer, we appreciate you joining us today. Is there any final comment you'd like to make?
No, thank you.
Thank you. The last proposal item is a stockholder proposal submitted by Mr. Eric Rehm and Ms. Mary Geary, who have appointed Investor Voice as a representative for this proposal. Mr. Bruce Herbert, who will be presenting the proposal. Mr. Herbert, we would like to offer you five minutes to present your proposal.
Thank you. Before commencing, if members of the press would like to ask questions or follow up on anything we present today, our email address is team@investorvoice.net. Ladies and gentlemen, I am Bruce Herbert of Investor Voice, and I appear today through the miracle of Ma Bell, though I would prefer to be physically standing among you, to move proposal number seven that seeks a simple majority vote on shareholder-sponsored items, which is how 61% of Intel peers count votes. This preponderance of Intel peers rely on a simple majority standard because it provides the most democratic, clear, and accurate picture of the intent of those stockholders who are both informed and decided. This standard only counts votes that are affirmatively cast for or against an item and excludes the abstained votes of those who have formally declined to express an opinion.
A simple majority standard does not arbitrarily ascribe negative intent to those who purposely abstain, nor does it allow Intel to pick winners and losers by calculating shareholder items differently from how it tallies its own director election. Such practices make Intel an outlier among its peers. In our negotiations, Intel made clear that it values and acts upon data. In line with this, it provided a list of the 23 companies it considers peers. However, Intel's interpretation of its own data was focused on just one segment of said peers. The company is also incorporated in Delaware. Since Intel is actually headquartered in California and its markets are transnational, there is neither logic nor utility to such a narrow point of view. Looked at as a whole, a more complete assessment of Intel's peer group actually reveals two facts.
Number one, 61% of all Intel peers use the simple majority standard requested by this proposal. Number two, every single one of the company's peer group that is not Delaware chartered, and fully 36% of those who are, use a simple majority formula. A chart of this data is linked in the proxy on page 86, first bullet point. We call on Intel to live up to the necessary conclusion drawn from its own data, and to follow the good governance best practices set by Intel's self-described peer group. In summary, counting abstentions artificially depresses the appearance of support for shareholder concerns relative to the director election. Counting abstentions is unnecessary, since shareholder items are typically non-binding. Counting abstentions is confusing, because it treats management's director vote more favorably than shareholder items, and counting abstentions is inconsistent with 61% of Intel's self-described peer group.
In closing, the simple majority standard proposed by item seven and used by most of Intel's peers, provides shareholders with better information about vote outcomes, allows more accurate communication between stockholders and the board, and eliminates the second-class treatment of shareholder items relative to management's director election. Therefore, we ask Intel to adopt simple majority voting for shareholder proposals. Please vote for item number seven. Thank you. That email again, for anyone wishing to follow up, is team@investorvoice.net.
Thank you, Mr. Herbert. The board certainly recognizes the importance of good corporate governance. Please refer to the 2017 Intel proxy statement for the board's views on this proposal. We appreciate you joining us today, Mr. Herbert. Is there anything else you'd like to say?
Well, I was going to wait until the question and answer period, because I was going to talk about the investor, or rather the virtual-only format, which we find very discouraging to shareholder democracy and true participation and communication with the board and management.
Thank you for your comment, Mr. Herbert. Because it is now past 8:45 A.M., the polls are now closed. Next, Brian will present a company business update.
Good morning, everybody. I am really excited to be here this morning. This is the completion of my fourth year as the CEO of this great company and my fifth shareholder meeting. It is very exciting for me to be here. This morning, I thought I would talk about really three things. Our 2016 results, how we look at the market in general, that data is really driving growth and innovation, not only in Intel as a company, but really the industry, and we believe just the world. Given that, what is Intel's strategy to really win amongst that ecosystem? Okay. With that, let us get into the first section, 2016 results. We are really proud. It was a record year, 2016. We closed the year at $59.5 billion. We were all really hoping to get up to $60 billion. We are working on that for 2017.
Really a record year for Intel from a revenue. Gross margins held at 63.2%. Again, another great year showing that our product roadmap and our product position in the market is as strong as it has ever been. We saw earnings per share growth at $2.72. That is up $0.22 year-over-year, just to give you a feeling for what kind of growth we saw in return to shareholder from an earnings per share standpoint. For us, we look at 2016, and really look at it as a great year with good growth and really good execution towards our long-term strategy. If you take a look at the next chart, this is really our shareholder return. We looked at, as of 12/30, or the end of 2016, our three-year shareholder return relative to the S&P and the Dow averages.
You can see that Intel has grown faster for the three-year time. Even over the one-year time, we continued to grow, although less than the Dow and the S&P in that timeframe. Let us take a quick look at really what the businesses were that grew and drove that growth in 2016. For CCG, which is our Client Computing Group, think of it as PCs, tablets, two-in-one devices, gaming consoles. It was really a phenomenal year of growth driven by real innovation, both by Intel and our partners that bring these devices to market, typically. Strong execution in a product roadmap, and a real great segmentation, thinking about the products that are important for gamers, for two-in-one devices, for set-top boxes, allowing us to really have higher product ASPs in this segment.
In the Data Center Group or DCG, we continue to grow double-digit growth rates in cloud, in networking, in comms, and our adjacency businesses like Omni-Path Fabric and Silicon Photonics and those areas. It is brought down by enterprise computing, what are called the classic big hardware in large companies, but still had high single-digit growth for the year. Data Center Group continues to grow, and we continue to see this as the next real big engine powering Intel along with the Client Group. Our IoT Group, which is focused really on industrial, retail, security, and when we talk about security, we are talking about really intelligent security cameras that can identify people and really understand video, grew in double-digit growth again. It has had record revenue, and we are really seeing this becoming a strong business and a large business as it grows in Intel in double digits.
Our PSG Group, which is the Altera FPGA Group that's come over now, it's had a year as being part of Intel. Really proud of what that team's delivered. One of the big milestones was actually delivering a 14 nm Stratix 10 FPGA product. That's an internally manufactured FPGA on Intel silicon. Really a great job getting that done within the year. We're now sampling that out to customers, and we'll see that ramp in the latter half of this year, and into next year. These product roadmaps, they take, with FPGAs, a little bit longer to get the customers to implement them into their products, but once you do, you see long product lifetimes and nice steady growth in those. We're really excited about our Stratix 10 family. Great-performing product. Lastly is our NSG or our Memory Group. Really a record year there again.
3D NAND and Optane. On 3D NAND, which is more of the classic NAND-type SSD products, we continue to see great progress on our product roadmap there. We've started up our Fab 68, which is our fab in Dalian, China, so we're producing a larger percentage of the volume internal to Intel. We're seeing our costs and our products really hit the targets that they need to in order to grow this business. Optane, which we've heard it called 3D XPoint in the past and a variety of other technology names, has really finished most of its product qualifications, and you're starting to see us ship it. We finished the qualifications at the end of last year and really started shipping in the first quarter of this year.
This product is really designed to re-architect how memory architectures within systems like data center systems, cloud-based systems, and even your client PCs work. We're really excited about what 3D Optane can bring to the marketplace. Let's talk about then now that we've talked about 2016 and the record year, what's driving this growth, and it's really driven by a view of the world that data is driving growth and innovation, in the world and the ecosystem, and just about everything that we see in our lives. Let's take a look at some interesting data. These are estimates made by third parties. The average Internet user, so that's you and I sitting at home doing our Facebook, doing our searches, and our tweets and things like that, we use about 650 MB a day today.
That's going to grow to about 1.5 GB by 2020. That's a more than 2x growth in data that you and I are going to produce on a daily rate. If you think about it, the amount of content you create in pictures and videos is continuously increasing as a percentage. That's what's really driving that growth as an individual basis. That's going to be tiny in comparison to the machines that are going to start delivering data to the Internet. The average autonomous vehicle, a car, driving only two hours a day, which is the average time that a car drives, is going to generate about 4 TB a day. You can think of that's about equivalent to almost 3,000 people of equivalent data.
You put a million of those autonomous cars on the road, that's equivalent to half the population of the Earth worth of data entering into the Internet as those autonomous cars hit the road. A connected airplane will, because it's running a little bit longer, will run 5 TB a day. A smart factory is 1 PB a day. Just video moving around the cloud is going to be 750 PB a day, and this is the movies and TV programs and all that we all watch and download and share with our friends. As more and more of that content becomes online and direct to consumers, just the amount of data that's going to move around the Internet, not even created by you necessarily, but used by you, is going to increase significantly.
When we think about this, this is what's really changing the world, this massive shift in the amount and quality of data that's going to come around. This is why you see things like artificial intelligence growing. Now there's enough compute power, and there's enough data to really make it meaningful and viable to do those kinds of calculations. We believe that Intel is a data company. What we mean by that is that our job is to really allow that data to move freely around the Internet, to have analytics applied to it, and to be used by all level of users, whether it be an individual user who's trying to watch their 4K video on their client device, or whether it's somebody trying to do video analytics, understanding an athlete's performance or security cameras or something like that.
Across that board, our job is to bring the data to the compute, make the compute as fast as possible, and provide the answers and solutions to the end users to whatever that need is. We think of ourselves as a data company, but not in storing and holding data, but in actually providing the engine to manipulate and move that data around. What's our strategy? Given that we've now built a view of the world that says data is going to grow at a massive amount, and that is going to be key, and that it's going to allow new usages and new analytics to be applied to it. We use this model, we call it a virtuous cycle, to really think about how data is generated, moved, and used.
As you look at what the moves we've made over the last few years, this picture kind of helps you understand and think about what it is that we're doing. First is there's those things down at the bottom, those things and devices. Those are everything from your PC, they're wearable devices that are measuring your heart rate or your distance or your steps. They're more complex things in a factory. They're the cameras, LiDARs, and sonar and radar sensors on an autonomous vehicle. All of these things are what's creating the data that's coming out, and that's really being generated. You need to have some form of connectivity to allow that data now to move, because data sitting on those individual things is almost worthless. Having your steps at the instantaneous moment is not that interesting.
Having your steps over weeks or months and understanding, are you getting stronger? Are you going further? Are you taking more steps each day? The number of days you hit your step goal increasing. To do that, it has to get up into the cloud, and people have to apply analytics. How do you compare against your friends? How do you compare against the norm? That connectivity is through our Wi-Fi technology, which Intel is a leader in that technology, through our 3G and 4G modem technology, which you've seen us really do a great job over the last couple of years getting into that segment of the business, and you see us in one of our leading phone manufacturers now. Eventually, as we go through the next couple of years, 5G. 5G is a really ubiquitous type of connectivity.
You get that up into the cloud and into the data center, and that's the other strength, and we've talked about the data center growth and it becoming the next big engine, because that's where the data is accumulated. It's accumulated by you, it's accumulated against your peers, it's accumulated against the other cars. It's what's going to allow things like autonomous driving to occur. It's going to provide the precision maps. It's going to provide the machine learning algorithms for autonomous driving only through the cloud and the analytics applied. The connectivity back down to the things, because those learning, those artificial intelligence algorithms have to get down to your car, they have to get down to your watch or your phone or your PC, so you can do something with them. You can see, you can use, you can have an experience.
That experience is enhanced by this. The accelerant technologies, you see us making investments in that. The investments in memory and 3D NAND are key to that, in our opinion, because it really drives the performance and the ability to bring that data closer to the computing. Our FPGAs are used there because that's what brings the software down into the silicon and allows the algorithms to occur at a faster rate and a faster time to give you the answers you want to have. You see, our recent acquisition of Mobileye is really an accelerant technology to allow better computer vision and better understanding of what's going on outside the car, and other mobile devices. This is kind of how we see the world and how we picture our growth and how we think about our investments.
If you take a look at this, I think the traditional market view of us is that we are a PC and a server company. If you look at that TAM, it's relatively capped at about $45 billion. We see the world in a much broader, a more expansive view. We see it as a much broader PC segment. The data center as including all of these adjacencies, the 3D XPoint, the Silicon Photonics, the Omni-Path Fabric, t he networking is a great example. Our market share and our growth rate there is still got a lot of room to grow. We're in the teens, and we're growing at double digits, so there's a lot of growth. We see the data center as a much more expansive. When you see the non-volatile memory segment is much bigger.
When you add all these up, we see our market as a $220 billion TAM rather than that $45 billion TAM that we talked about earlier. That is the more traditional view of Intel, that $45 billion, but it is not how we see the world given that virtuous cycle that I just talked about. How we win in this market, we first want to make sure that we are at the right market. We really think about the businesses that are driving these segments that we just talked about in this virtuous cycle. We have the right timing. Things like you have to be getting into those autonomous vehicles now. Now is the time. Artificial intelligence, be a leader in that space now as it is emerging. It is one of the smallest segments of the data center, but it is the fastest-growing segment of the data center right now.
You need to have the products, and you need to have the expertise there. Domain expertise, and you have seen us hire strategic people from external to the company to really increase our expertise in these areas. Partnerships and M&A, you have seen both of those over this last year as we continue to grow and focus on these. W e think about these things as end-to-end solutions. You cannot come with one piece of silicon when you are trying to build out an autonomous car with a partner. You really have to have that entire solution with them and give them one place to go for that technical and those analytics and the silicon itself. S ilicon and software leadership, which we believe is our strengths and the core of what we do here at Intel. I am really proud of the leadership team that we have here.
As you look across this, 25% of the executives of this management team are new to Intel in the last two years. That goes back to that getting the domain expertise, getting the areas that are new and emerging. 60% of these are new to the management team. They may have come from within Intel, but they are new to this level of leadership in the last two years. I f you go just to people who have moved to new jobs, because we think that is how you grow and really focus on new leaders, it is 67% of these are new to their roles. We are going to continue to grow this leadership team. I am really excited about what we have brought to the shareholders as a leadership team, both in our strategy, our execution, as exemplified by last year, and really our view of the future.
My commitment to you also continues to hold, is around our corporate responsibility. We believe that we continue to create value for our shareholders. Our corporate responsibility report was released today. We have integrated a lot more new data. We tried to make it a little bit easier for people to read and understand. It is our 16th annual corporate responsibility report, and I really want to have you visit our website, download it, read about it. We are very proud of the results that we have accomplished from a corporate responsibility standpoint. Our sustainable supply chain, the diversity improvements that we have made, and really leading the industry and trying to set the culture of really our entire industry. Really moving beyond diversity and thinking about it as an inclusive environment. Just thinking about social impact and how does a company like Intel really drive social impact.
With that, I'll hand it back over to Andy for Q&A, and thank you very much for another successful year.
Thanks, Brian. We will now proceed with the Q&A session. We will answer previously submitted questions as well as questions submitted on the web during today's meeting. We have received more questions than we will be able to answer in the time allotted during this morning's meeting. We will follow up with all investors who have provided their contact information. Thank you for the interest. Thank you for the questions. Let's get started. Question one, which came in as a pre-submitted question. Workday is the HR tool that Intel uses. When was the clear conflict of interest where Aneel Bhusri declared as CEO of Workday? Isn't there at least an appearance of conflict of interest of having the CEO of Workday on the board as we move to their software?
Intel signed its first contract with Workday to become our HR system before Mr. Bhusri joined the board. After joining the board, consistent with Intel policy, he has recused himself from all negotiations and all business conduct between Workday and Intel, as have Brian and I have made sure that we weren't involved as well. We do consider this a serious issue. It's one we have to focus on. We have strong controls in place, and we follow those controls. From the web, this will be for Brian. Your competitor, AMD, now appears to be back with products in both the PC and data center markets after being absent for years, and they seem confident that they can capture significant share from Intel in both markets.
What kind of share loss, if any, is Intel planning for, and does Intel believe that it can accelerate its product road maps to reestablish the large lead in product competitiveness that it previously enjoyed?
This is a good question. First, I think let's take it to a higher level. We constantly think about competition and whether it's AMD or many other players over the years in almost every one of our segments. We actually think competition is both good for the market, good for consumers, but good for Intel because it really drives us to be a stronger and more competitive company. I think any company that doesn't have good, strong competition, it just isn't running at its best. Specifically around AMD and what are we thinking about for 2017, we've put in our forecasts for 2017 our view of what AMD's roadmap is and our roadmap. More importantly, what we've done is, again, as an example of this driving a better Intel, we've pulled in several of our products.
You've seen some of the announcements that we've already made. We've pulled products in between one and five quarters, as much as five quarters, in order to bring an even more competitive and better product lineup to our consumers. Given all of that, we're very comfortable with the forecasts we have for this year, both in revenue, share, and our ASPs, our average selling price of our products. We'll continue to monitor all of our competition across all of these products and segments that we do. I think it'll continue to drive us to execute better and pull in and drive better products throughout, not just this year, but all the years in the future.
The next question from the web, I know that Intel wants to have a model virtual meeting. Conoco's virtual meeting allows people to make both comments and ask questions by phone as well as typing in comments. Why has Intel made this process so disembodied and difficult for any direct input to management and the board? As you know, the pension funds of New York City have asked all companies holding virtual-only meetings to move to hybrid meeting with an in-person meeting as well. The pension funds of New York see virtual-only meetings as poor governance, as is the Council of Institutional Investors, and plans to vote against nominating committee members if this process continues. Is the board discussing the pros and cons of virtual-only meetings in light of this new round of opposition? Intel takes seriously the question of an in-person meeting versus a virtual meeting.
It was debated before last year vigorously for 6 - 12 months, quite frankly, as to whether we should do virtual or not. We have a robust investor outreach program. We did go and talk to our major investors and got an agreement that a virtual meeting was worth trying, would be okay. After last year's meeting, we went back again to the majority of our shareholders, and we asked questions about how did it work, was it acceptable, and is this process okay. Again, we got no pushback. We got confirmation that it was okay. Why we do this, it saves money. It's more efficient. The interesting question I had not thought of was should we allow, as Conoco does, people to actually make a comment by phone as well as just the Internet? That's a good input. We will look at that.
We are looking to improve how we do this process. We do want it to be as personal as possible, yet we don't want to waste a lot of corporate money on meetings that can be done more efficiently. Next question, also from the web, live. How are the speed of your processes competing against the GPUs that NVIDIA makes for deep learning?
Okay. Sure. I'll take that one. Again, another great question. We talked about deep learning and really artificial intelligence in general in my remarks. Although the smaller segment of the data center overall, it's the fastest-growing, so we do see it as emerging workload and key to future growth. We think of, if you really understand artificial intelligence, there's both training and then inference. Think about it as you teach it how to identify things, to make decisions, then you go out, and you make those decisions. You need to have solutions that can go across that span of products. There are very different workloads. An autonomous car needs something very different than a security camera that's doing the same kind of deep learning or artificial intelligence that's different than a drone or a robot or something like that.
We've really built what we believe is a broad spectrum of products that go from high performance, low power, like our acquisition of Movidius that you saw last year. This is an excellent system for cameras, for drones, for robotics, where low power and high performance are required, up to our Atom and then our Xeon processors, which are actually the largest shareholders of artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithm applications right now. Our Xeon Phi products, our FPGAs. FPGAs are running more along the performance levels that you start to see the GPUs. You saw us make an acquisition last year of a company called Nervana. Nervana is an ASIC-based deep learning tool, neural network-based , that is really meant to be at the very top end. It's a high power, high performance.
You're going to use this in a data center for very deep learning. That one very much outperforms a GPU-based system. We've really built a broad spectrum of products so that as a company, we can go to our customers with solutions that fit their needs based on the workloads, the application, the energy levels they can support, and across that. We're winning share, and we believe we're growing in this segment of the market.
Next question, again for Brian. It appears that the investment from Mobileye comes at a very high cost. How did the valuation of a company with approximately $360 million in revenue come out to become something approximately $15 billion?
Sure. We're really excited about our acquisition of Mobileye, and it's because we really view the autonomous vehicle market, when you just take a look at that market, as really a $30 billion hardware TAM, or total market, and probably include hardware and software, something in the order of $70 billion, maybe more, on an annualized basis. That's really a much bigger TAM than I think that people really think about. Remember I said in our discussion that you need to provide complete solutions. Because when you walk into an autonomous car manufacturer, they don't want to just talk to you about one part of it, your ability to produce one segment. What we needed to do to build out the complete platform, we have the data center, we have the 5G and 4G connectivity, we have the compute engine.
We needed the ability to really put in what we believe is the world's best computer vision system for really having a car see and understand the world. That's where Mobileye really gives us the last step and complete access to that $30 billion TAM, hardware TAM. That's why we're excited about it and why we felt like we were willing to invest that money. The additional thing you need to understand is, assuming that we're able to get regulatory approval and close the deal sometime towards the end of this year, remember we said it would be about nine months, and we did it back in March timeframe. The acquisition will be EPS accretive in its first year post the acquisition. It will bring earnings per share growth to you as a shareholder right out of the gun based on this.
Remember, we're buying this for a market that's the autonomous car market, most people agree, is sometime in, you're going to start seeing it in 2019 to about 2021 is when you'll start to really see this. The growth that we're talking about is really out in time, a couple of years. You have to be there now to get in those designs, and to really win in that marketplace.
For Brian, how is Intel positioned for the increased use of devices other than conventional PCs?
That's a good one. I think I did a pretty good job. Hopefully, I did a good job in my presentation talking about the growth segments that we're looking at outside the PC. If you look at what we forecasted for this year, we're not saying the company's going to grow based on our PC. In fact, we said PCs would be down mid to low single digits as a company. We're really growing in those other four vectors, the Data Center, IoT, NSG, FPGAs. Those are the four areas that are really going to be our growth engines, and those are the, I'll call it, other devices per se, that we're really focusing on and targeting on in order for us to grow. It's playing out quite nicely. If you take a look at 2016, the PC has declined as a percentage.
Even though we had record revenue, the PC declined as a percentage of that revenue. It's just over 50% now, and we expect over the next couple of years, as our revenues grow still, the PC will become less than 50% of our revenue. If you look at it on a profit basis, it is already less than 50% of our profit. We're really proud of that transition. We've moved it from when we started this to in the 30s to now more than 50% of our profit coming from these growth areas. That's great performance and great job of transition by the team.
From live from the web, what stage of planning for next CEO succession is the board currently at? We think we have a pretty robust process at this point. During the last transition, we used an outside firm to help us with the process. We've already engaged them, and we are working at that level at trying to figure out what the skill sets for the next CEO would be, what the company will look like when the next transition happens, which of course we hope is years out. We think Brian's doing a wonderful job. At the same time, at the board, we review the internal candidates who could possibly be the next CEO. We have and are working active development plans to improve their skill sets so that at the time we are looking for a new CEO, we should have more than one, multiple internal candidates.
I would assume the board at that point in time would also look externally to make sure we get the best possible person to be the CEO of Intel. It is actually an active, very good process right now. Next question. Intel's data strategy is secure and safe from hackers?
The strategy where we have things like Secure Boot and segmentation of data. What that means is that the system , and that means that you can't go out and easily compromise that device and boot it up and get control of it. We go to the networking functions, and we look at things like trusted devices, and there's a handshake between Intel's devices at the edge and the networking devices saying, "Are these trusted devices that are on the network?" If it's a non-trusted device, it isolates it and doesn't allow it access to certain segments of the network. You go back up into the data that's key to the security of the device and put that into basically an enclave. Probably more importantly, so that's all the silicon level, but we work with our partners.
Our partners, everything from Google and Microsoft and the device partners all through there to build software levels that ride above our silicon and use those assets, even in our SSDs that we build for memory function and storage. There are security features that the device manufacturers then can access such that they know that there's been no compromise to that storage or that memory device, and access to it. We're constantly working through all of those layers to ensure that the security is the best we can deliver to our customers.
Next question. How do you protect company patents and intellectual rights from insider and outside security issues?
I'll take that one again. First, I'd tell you that we take this subject very seriously. We operate all around the world, for both internal and external, as you look around the world, we have procedures and technologies that we use to protect our intellectual property. You can think of it as kind of tiered based on just how critical is the intellectual property. Things like the recipes to our silicon technology, which is the most critical to us and our most important intellectual property. We even go as far as no one person has the complete recipe, and it's not stored in any one location, and there's all kinds of protections we do to make sure that intellectual property is protected and secure for both internal, and that's internal I talked about, but external as well.
We're very proud of, w e've had a very strong effort in patenting that intellectual property over the last few years, and we've increased our patents in many of the areas and segments of our business to ensure that we're protected from that standpoint, which helps us protect our property from external. Lastly, we vigorously defend it. We invented x86 technology, as an example. We're very proud of that, and we vigorously defend it at all times through relationships, through the court systems, whatever it takes to defend those things that we invent, if we see them misused or taken in any way, shape, or form.
Next question. Could you give us insight into when we will see the first 10 nm products for desktop computers and data center?
Sure. I'll take that one. 10 nm, I can tell you right now, is going very well. We're on schedule to have production by the end of this year, and we will be shipping to our end customers by the end of this year. Think of that as our PC manufacturing OEMs and other partners, by the end of this year. When they bring out products is always, t hey have to go through their qualifications and get their form factors out there and all. I'm very comfortable with shipping it this year. I think you'll see it on market, in shelf, really 2018, first half, and it'll ramp throughout 2018. It's healthy. It's going quite well. We review this on a regular basis, and we're confident that we'll be able to ship product this year.
Okay. The last question we will get to today on the webcast. I see that you're moving the company to be more data-centric , increasing the overall total available market. How will the announcement that Microsoft's operating system will run PC software on Arm-based platforms impact Intel's bottom line and stock price? Has the new data-centric strategy guarded against this competitive impact and time?
Great question. Simple answer is yes, we believe we've protected ourselves quite well. The way you do that is, there's been these kinds of products before, and the way we go and compete against them is by bringing better performance at a lower cost. We believe that because we invented x86, as I talked about just a few minutes ago, our ability to bring unique features, unique functions, and better performance at a better cost and power is absolutely there. At the end, the customer always wants the best product for the best price. We believe we have a very competitive, probably the most competitive roadmap that we've ever had in all of these segments, in the PC specifically. You saw us doing that last year, right?
We grew both profitability and our ASPs last year in the PC segment, and we did that through great products. We'll continue to do that. A s I said earlier, we'll continue to defend our x86 license, and our x86 intellectual property as well as these products come out.
Thanks, Brian. Thank you for all your questions. The question and answer session is now closed. Sam, would you please provide the preliminary voting results?
Yes. Before providing the preliminary results, a correction to the board attendance. Dr. Liu is in attendance at today's meeting. The final results will be available early next week. The preliminary results of stockholder vote are, e ach board nominee received a total of more than 95% of the shares voted, and so each nominee has been reelected. On the ratification of the selection of the company's independent auditors, approximately 98% of the shares voted were voted in favor of the proposal, and so the proposal is approved. On the advisory vote to approve executive compensation, approximately 94% of the shares voted were voted for the proposal, and so the proposal is approved. On the vote to approve an amendment to our 2006 Equity Incentive Plan, approximately 95% of the shares voted were voted for the proposal, and so the proposal is approved.
On the advisory vote to approve the frequency of the say-on-pay vote, 89% voted for every year, and so every year is approved. On the stockholder proposal recommending an annual advisory vote on political contributions, approximately 7% of the shares voted were voted for the proposal, so the proposal is not approved. On the simple majority voting stockholder proposal, approximately 10% of the shares voted were voted for the proposal, so the proposal is not approved. Final vote tallies, including the ballots submitted today, will be posted on our website at intc.com and in our next 8-K filing with the SEC within four business days. Now I turn it back to Andy.
Thanks, Sam. As Sam 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 annual report. Electronic delivery reduces the paper in your mailbox and reduces the company expenses. Our agenda having been completed, and the time adopted for adjournment has arrived, I declare this meeting adjourned. On behalf of Intel, thank you for attending this year's stockholder meeting.