Intel said Monday that Chief Executive of Product Michelle Johnston Holthaus will step down after more than three decades with the company. She will stay on as a strategic adviser.
This is just one of the many changes in Intel’s senior leadership ever since Lip-Bu Tan took on the role of CEO in March. The company also announced the creation of a central engineering group that will build a new custom silicon business for outside customers, led by Srinivasan “Srini” Iyengar who joined Intel from Cadence Design Systems in July.
Intel also said that Kevok Kechichian, formerly of ARM, will join the company as head of its data center group. Jim Johnson, has been appointed senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s client computing group. Naga Chandrasekaran, the chief technology and operations officer of Intel Foundry — the company’s business unit that builds custom chips for outside customers — is also taking on an expanded role.
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“With Srini leading Central Engineering, we’re aligning innovation and execution more tightly in service to customers,” Tan said in a company press release. “We are laser-focused on delivering world-class products and empowering our engineering teams to move faster and execute with excellence. Kevork, Jim, and Srini are exceptional leaders whose deep technical acumen and industry relationships will be instrumental as we continue building a new Intel.”
Tan was appointed as CEO earlier this year, succeeding interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus.
Recently, President Donald Trump reached an agreement to purchase a stake in Intel, in a move that might prove troublesome for the company. The Trump administration’s investment in Intel was structured to deter the chipmaker from selling its manufacturing unit, its chief financial officer said on Thursday, locking it into a lossmaking business it has faced pressure to offload.
“I don’t think there’s a high likelihood that we would take our stake below the 50 percent, so ultimately I would expect [the warrant] to expire,” CFO David Zinsner told a Deutsche Bank conference. “I think from the government’s perspective, they were aligned with that: they didn’t want to see us take the business and spin it off or sell it to somebody.”
Intel and the U.S. government are negotiating a landmark deal as part of the CHIPS and Science Act funding, which could see the government acquire a 10% ownership stake in Intel through the conversion of federal grants into equity. However, this stake has not yet been finalized or officially acquired