AMD's market cap has grown from $2 billion to over $240 billion in the last decade. Intel's has barely moved while they've burned through CEOs and lost market share.
Intel once set the pace for an entire industry. Now, it's setting the gold standard for corporate self-sabotage. In their latest act of boardroom malpractice, they passed over their most operationally grounded internal leader, Justin Hotard, and handed the keys of a manufacturing company to — wait for it — a man who has never run a factory in his life.
This isn't bold strategy. This is non-deliverance dressed up as vision.
Twenty Years of Bad Calls
Intel's board has been perfecting the art of missing the point:
Blew the mobile chip revolution, while ARM, Qualcomm, and Apple ate their lunch.
Let TSMC sprint past them in process technology.
Ran off wave after wave of engineering talent — the people who actually know how to make chips work.
And now, at the moment when manufacturing execution is existential, they've done it again.
Lip-Bu Tan: The Wrong Guy for the Job
Make no mistake: Lip-Bu Tan is a brilliant strategist. He built Walden International, one of the most influential semiconductor venture firms. He ran Cadence Design Systems, a titan in electronic design automation. He knows software. He knows ecosystems. He knows Wall Street.
You could argue Intel needs this outside perspective after years of insider thinking. You could argue his venture background provides unique insight into emerging technologies. You could even argue his ecosystem knowledge will help Intel's struggling foundry attract customers.
You'd be wrong.
What he does not know — at all — is how to run a complex manufacturing operation:
Never run high-volume manufacturing of any kind.
Never managed production ramps, capacity planning, or supply chain coordination.
Never dealt with the brutal economics of keeping expensive facilities running efficiently.
Intel isn't a design house or a venture capital firm. It's a manufacturing company — one that designs complex chips, runs multiple product lines, and operates some of the world's most expensive factories while trying to compete with TSMC and Samsung.
It's like hiring a brilliant architect to run a steel mill. Pretty PowerPoints, zero clue how to keep the operations running.
The Lisa Su They Let Walk
When AMD promoted Lisa Su to CEO in 2014, she wasn't a strategic hire or an outsider with a grand vision. She'd spent three years proving she could execute — managing AMD's product roadmaps, delivering on complex engineering projects, and demonstrating operational discipline when the company was hemorrhaging money.
Su earned the role through results, not relationships. She'd shown she could take broken product lines and make them work, coordinate across fractured engineering teams, and deliver on promises when execution was life-or-death for the company.
Justin Hotard was following exactly this playbook at Intel. He stabilized the Data Center and AI business when it was teetering, brought discipline to product roadmaps, and had the rare ability to earn trust from engineering teams while holding them accountable. That combination — urgency, clarity, and operational rigor — is exactly what Intel needed in the corner office.
But instead of promoting the executive who'd proven he could execute, the board let him walk — to Nokia, of all places.
Intel could have backed their proven operator the way AMD backed theirs. Instead, Intel chose vision over execution, optics over substance, and PowerPoint over process. The timing of Hotard's departure and Tan's appointment raises another interesting story — one that only the fly on the wall in Intel's boardroom knows.
What Intel Needed
Intel doesn't need another strategist. It doesn't need another relationship guy. It needs a wartime operator — someone who lives and breathes complex operations, execution milestones, and operational discipline. Someone to:
Drive execution across multiple product lines and manufacturing operations.
Demand accountability on every blown deadline.
Rebuild an engineering-first culture that rewards results, not narratives.
Hotard could have been that leader. Instead, he's the Lisa Su that got away.
The Cost of Non-Deliverance
This isn't about personality. It's about competence.
When you're years behind in process technology, when your operations are struggling across multiple business lines, you don't hire a venture capitalist with a good Rolodex. You hire someone who knows how to execute at scale.
Intel's board just told the world — and their own engineers — that optics matter more than execution. And unless something changes fast, they'll keep watching their operations struggle while competitors pull ahead.
The Closing Shot
Intel could have had its turnaround moment. Instead, it chose PowerPoint over process, vision over yield, and optics over substance.
When the history of this company's decline is written, this decision will have its own chapter — right after "How We Missed the Mobile Wave" and "Why TSMC Lapped Us. Twice."