The Q&A session came on the heels of layoffs across the company. Tan was hired in March, and almost immediately he began to promise to divest and reduce non-core assets. Gelsinger had also begun divesting the company of losers, but they were nibbles around the edge. Tan is promising to take an axe to the place.
In addition to discontinuing products, the company has outsourced marketing and media relations — for the first time in more than 25 years of covering this company, I have no internal contacts at Intel.
Many more workers are going to lose their jobs in coming weeks. So far about 500 have been cut in Oregon and California but many more is expected — as much as 20% of the overall company staff may go, and Intel has over 100,000 employees, according to published reports.
Tan believes the company is bloated and too bogged down with layers of management to be reactive and responsive in the same way that AMD and Nvidia are. “The whole process of that (deciding) is so slow and eventually nobody makes a decision,” he is quoted as saying.
Something he has decided on is AI, and he seems to have decided to give up. “On training, I think it is too late for us,” Tan said, adding that Nvidia’s position in that market is simply “too strong.” So there goes what sales Gaudi3 could muster.
Instead, Tan said Intel will focus on “edge” artificial intelligence, where AI capabilities Are brought to PCs and other remote devices rather than big AI processors in data centers like Nvidia and AMD are doing. “That’s an area that I think is emerging, coming up very big and we want to make sure that we capture,” Tan said.