Intel announces leadership overhaul, underscoring long road to recovery

Intel has announced leadership changes that include the exit of products chief Michelle Johnston Holthaus and the launch of a central engineering group, as the company tries to streamline operations and strengthen its push into foundry and custom silicon services.

The new central engineering group will be led by Srinivasan Iyengar, who will oversee horizontal engineering functions and build a custom silicon business aimed at serving a broad range of external customers, the company said in a statement.

Intel also named Kevork Kechichian executive vice president and general manager of its data center group. He joins from Arm, where he led the shift from IP licensing to full-stack solutions, and has also held senior roles at NXP Semiconductors and Qualcomm.

In other significant changes, Naga Chandrasekaran of Intel Foundry will expand his role to include oversight of Foundry Services. Jim Johnson has been appointed as senior vice president and general manager of the client computing group.

Intel’s turnaround challenge

Analysts say Intel can no longer rely on the strategies that powered its dominance in the early 2000s. A lack of vision and reluctance to innovate have led to a series of missteps, contributing to the company’s current slowdown.

“Intel’s leadership team missed four major waves: first, the mobile and smartphone market; second, the AI accelerator and data center custom compute boom; third, the rise of automotive silicon for digital cockpit and autonomous driving; and fourth, the growth of pure-play foundries,” said Neil Shah, VP for research at Counterpoint Research.

The restructuring could signal to investors and customers that Intel is taking tough steps to change its situation, Shah added.

For enterprise leaders, the exit of Michelle Johnston Holthaus is unlikely to affect Intel’s client computing or enterprise product roadmap in the short term, said Sravan Kundojjala, an analyst at SemiAnalysis. He noted that Intel’s PC strategy is already in motion, centered on AI PCs, the 18A process node, and renewed attention to desktops.

The bigger challenge, Kundojjala said, is Intel’s continuing market share losses to AMD and Arm-based rivals.

“In the near term, execution should remain on track given the long lead times of product development, but OEM confidence and channel relationships could see short-term disruption,” said Manish Rawat, semiconductor analyst at TechInsights. “Intel must quickly reinforce continuity to avoid any perception of uncertainty in its PC and enterprise client strategy, especially as AMD and Apple continue to pressure the premium laptop market.”

Fab, a low-hanging fruit?

The foundry business could be Intel’s most immediate opportunity, as customers and governments look for alternatives to TSMC and Samsung.

Expanding Chandrasekaran’s role is meant to more tightly integrate and centralize the foundry business to offer a more competitive service and better execution, which also closely aligns with Intel’s merchant silicon offerings.

“Chandrasekaran is a proven leader from Micron, which ramped up multiple DRAM nodes at a rapid pace with solid performance in terms of yields and power,” Kundojjala said. “He has instituted capex discipline at Intel and is driving equipment reuse from node to node. We think, under Chandrasekaran, Intel Foundry will progress at a faster rate than they have been before in terms of node maturity, customer traction and ramp timings.”

It reflects an operations-driven approach to catch up with TSMC and Samsung, where reliability and delivery track record matter as much as process innovation, Rawat added. This also hints at Intel prioritizing credibility with hyperscalers and fabless customers that are wary of past delays.

Data center challenge

The data center and high-performance computing market is the biggest growth area for chipmakers, driven by AI demand and by hyperscalers seeking alternatives to Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, and Marvell. Despite this potential, Intel has struggled to keep pace.

“Intel’s datacenter group continues to lose market share with no clear end in sight,” Kundojjala added. “The company must first halt share erosion to AMD and Arm-based competitors. Strengthening multi-threading support and improving power efficiency relative to Arm designs will be critical. We do not expect Intel’s server CPU share to recover in the near term, with meaningful progress likely after the launch of Coral Rapids in the 2028–2029 timeframe.”

The appointment of Kechichian signals a push to address these challenges. Kechichian will lead the company’s data center portfolio, including the Xeon processor family, a core part of Intel’s cloud and enterprise business.

Analysts suggest that Kechichian’s expertise in power-efficient, scalable core design is increasingly relevant as hyperscalers adopt Arm-based servers such as Amazon’s Graviton and Nvidia’s Grace.

“While Intel is unlikely to abandon x86, Kechichian’s background suggests a dual-track strategy: reinforcing x86 leadership with Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest, while also exploring custom accelerators, heterogeneous compute, and perhaps even closer collaboration with Arm or Arm-inspired designs,” Rawat said. “It reflects Intel’s recognition that data center competitiveness is no longer solely about raw CPU performance, but about workload-optimized architectures and total platform efficiency.” 

Prabhu Ram, VP of industry research at Cybermedia Research, said this external expertise could help shape Intel’s architectural roadmap for enterprise workloads, with hybrid approaches designed to improve AI and cloud performance while maintaining core priorities. “There is cautious optimism that these moves will deliver, provided Intel executes with speed – closing competitive gaps, restoring investor confidence, and charting a sustainable path for long-term growth,” Ram added.