Geoff Colvin
It certainly wasn’t the savior’s welcome Lip-Bu Tan may have expected. It was March 2025, and he had just been named Intel’s CEO, lured back after resigning from the company’s board of directors seven months earlier. Intel was drifting, overseen temporarily by two executives after the previous CEO abruptly retired. Now, for the first time, Tan was addressing online all Intel employees globally. They were looking for straight talk—and if they felt they weren’t getting it, the Intel culture would let them say so.
“You’re allowed to ask whatever you want in our company and not feel any ramifications from that,” a recently retired 30-year employee tells Fortune. Tan “was immediately asked, ‘Why did you quit [when he resigned from the board]—and now you think you’re going to come back and save us?’” Tan’s answer that he was dealing with personal things did not assuage the crowd. The veteran employee says side chats immediately lit up with criticism. “They were very frustrated with his answer.”
If Tan was sweating then, the heat cranked up considerably in August, when Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton alleged that Tan controlled Chinese companies and had a stake in hundreds of Chinese technology firms, some of which reportedly had ties to the Chinese army. President Trump quickly posted on Truth Social that Tan “is highly CONFLICTED and must resign.”
Yet after Tan met with Trump four days later, the winds started to shift for Intel. The two seemed to hit it off, and not long thereafter they struck a nearly unprecedented deal: Intel would send 9.9% of its stock to the federal government, and the U.S. would convey $8.9 billion to Intel. Then, in late September, the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, agreed to invest $5 billion in the chipmaker. Under their agreement, Intel will produce a broad range of new chips combining technology from both companies, with Nvidia buying some of the chips.
Craig Barrett, a former Intel CEO, told Fortune recently that this model—customers putting new capital into the company—could save Intel, which desperately needs cash. “The only place the cash can come from is the customers,” he says. “They are all cash-rich, and if eight of them were willing to invest $5 billion each, then Intel would have a chance.” In addition to Nvidia, those companies would likely include Apple, Broadcom, Google, Qualcomm
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