Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s tenure since taking the role in March 2025 has included one of the more dramatic public reversals in recent corporate history. In August 2025, President Trump publicly called for Tan’s resignation as Intel’s CEO, citing alleged ties to China-based investments — an allegation Trump made publicly but that was never the subject of any criminal charge against Tan. Rather than resign, Tan met directly with Trump; following that meeting, Trump instead publicly praised Tan as a “success,” and the administration announced the federal government would take a direct equity stake in Intel.
That stake was finalized as a 10% ownership position in Intel, funded through an $8.9 billion investment drawn from CHIPS Act grant money the government had not yet disbursed to Intel plus other semiconductor-manufacturing awards, purchased at $20.47 per share. As Intel’s stock has since risen, the government’s stake — making Washington one of Intel’s largest shareholders — grew to roughly $36 billion at its peak reported value, an unrealized paper gain for taxpayers of close to $27 billion since the investment was announced. Tan has publicly described the arrangement as a deliberate strategic move, comparing it to how the Taiwanese government supports domestic chipmaker TSMC, rather than a bailout of a struggling company.
A Real Operating Turnaround Behind the Political Drama
Away from the government-stake headlines, Intel’s actual quarterly results have genuinely improved on Tan’s watch. The company’s second-quarter 2026 earnings, reported in late July, showed revenue of $16.1 billion, up 25% year-over-year and Intel’s seventh consecutive quarter of exceeding Wall Street’s expectations on revenue, gross margin, and earnings per share — even as the company still reported an $11 billion GAAP net loss for the period, reflecting the enormous ongoing cost of Intel’s chip-manufacturing buildout. Tan has publicly acknowledged that Intel still needs to “leapfrog” rivals AMD and Arm technologically, and has pointed to edge AI and robotics as a market he expects to eventually become as large as the traditional PC business Intel built its original reputation on.
A New, Unlikely Partner: Elon Musk
In April 2026, Intel signed on as the primary foundry partner for Terafab, a $25 billion joint chip-manufacturing venture between Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI aimed at producing custom AI, satellite, and autonomous-vehicle chips at a target scale of one terawatt of AI compute per year. The planned Austin, Texas facility would use Intel’s 18A manufacturing process — a node still in the early stages of high-volume production — to build chips for Tesla’s autonomous vehicles and robots, SpaceX’s proposed orbital data centers, and xAI’s own AI infrastructure. Whether Intel’s 18A process can actually deliver the yields and volumes Terafab’s ambitious targets require remains a genuinely open technical question, separate from the deal’s strategic logic.
A Semiconductor Industry Veteran, Not an Outsider Brought In to Cut Costs
Tan’s turnaround credibility rests partly on a long semiconductor and chip-design industry résumé that predates his Intel role by decades. Before joining Intel as CEO in March 2025, Tan spent more than a decade running Cadence Design Systems, one of the two dominant companies (alongside Synopsys) that make the electronic design automation software nearly every chipmaker in the world, including Intel itself, relies on to actually design modern semiconductors. That background gave Tan direct, technical familiarity with the chip-design challenges Intel’s manufacturing division was struggling with, rather than the more common pattern of an outside financial or operations executive being brought in to lead a distressed technology company purely on cost-cutting credentials.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Tan’s turnaround is a real, current example of how quickly a major technology company’s public standing can shift — a CEO publicly told by a sitting U.S. president to resign, within roughly a year, presiding over the same government becoming one of his company’s largest shareholders sitting on a multibillion-dollar paper gain. For any Philippine founder navigating a serious public or regulatory crisis, it’s a reminder that direct, good-faith engagement with a skeptical counterpart can sometimes produce a genuinely better outcome than either public confrontation or silent withdrawal — though the underlying operating improvement (seven consecutive quarters of beaten expectations) mattered just as much as the political resolution itself. Intel’s Terafab partnership with Musk’s companies is also worth watching directly for any Philippine hardware or robotics startup: a credible, at-scale alternative chip-manufacturing partner beyond TSMC and Samsung, even one still years from proven high-volume output, is a genuine long-term signal about where global chip-supply diversification is actually headed. Tan’s own background running Cadence — a company whose software every major chipmaker depends on regardless of who they compete with — also gave him a genuinely unusual, cross-industry vantage point on Intel’s specific manufacturing weaknesses before he ever took the CEO role, a reminder that deep, adjacent-industry expertise can sometimes matter more in a turnaround situation than direct prior experience running the exact company being fixed.
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