You joined Intel as a quality-control technician aged 18 in 1979 and worked there until 2009. Between leaving in 2009 and rejoining as CEO in 2021, Intel went from being arguably the world’s leading semiconductor company to being in a state of rapid decline. How did it feel to watch from the outside?

It was painful. First, it was painful to leave the company, as I was, I'll say, nudged out the door at that period of time. It took me years to get over it. I joke that I used to do the Intel bong when I went to sleep at night. To watch its decline and some of the decisions that were made, it was hard, it was emotional.

When you re-joined Intel as CEO over three years ago, you came bearing an ambitious strategy that you asked the company’s board of directors to agree to as a condition for your taking the role. One of the key pillars of that strategy is to retake the lead in terms of manufacturing the most advanced chips from your main manufacturing competitor, TSMC, by 2025. As I understand it, things are going well so far, but you’re not there yet. Is catching up with TSMC by 2025 do-or-die for Intel?

This is a really important piece of the overall strategy—get back to process technology, competitiveness, and leadership. We see the end of that [being] what we call our “five nodes in four year” journey. Every day, our confidence builds in it. When we laid that strategy out three years ago, people were like: “Wow, that's so audacious, how are you ever going to pull that off?” Here we are three years into it, and we see the end of making all of those things that we said come true. So our confidence has grown substantially in our ability to make it happen.

You seem pretty confident that you can continue to turn things around at Intel. But the markets don’t seem to share your confidence—your shares fell 31% in April, their worst month in more than 20 years, after disappointing quarterly results. Is there something that you know that the markets don’t?

Well clearly, we are on a multi-year journey, and stock markets are generally looking at what I like to say is 90-day shot clocks: what's your next quarter going to look like? A very near term basis.
We've given now tremendous transparency to [Wall Street] of what the foundry business costs are, and what the losses are, and how we're going to bring that back to profitability.
If you're looking and judging us on a 90-day or near term, financial return, hey, I understand the skepticism.

Could it not be that investors are more skeptical than you are of your ability to execute this turnaround strategy, which is very ambitious?

I do admit there is skepticism from some of the investors. Some of them, when they looked at us, thought: “Wow, this is a long term strategy.
It's an expensive long term strategy, it has risks associated with it as well.” We accept that those are the case.
But here we are three years in. I'm much more confident today than I was when I launched that strategy three years ago.
Because we see the evidence—the wafers are popping out of fab [fabrication plants], we're proving the transistors work, we're seeing the advanced packaging leadership position, we're seeing the AI products start to come to life as well.