There is a story that Silicon Valley insiders have told for years, almost as a cautionary tale. In 2007, as Apple was quietly preparing to launch the iPhone, Steve Jobs decided he didn't want Intel making the chips for it. His reasoning, recounted later by people who were in the room, was blunt: Intel was "really slow — like a steamship," in Jobs' own words. Apple went with a smaller, nimbler supplier instead.
That one conversation — that one snub — set off what would become a two-decade drift for one of America's most storied technology companies. Intel had once been so dominant that hardware makers competed to slap "Intel Inside" stickers on their machines. But as the world moved toward mobile, then cloud computing, then artificial intelligence, Intel kept arriving just a little too late, carrying just a little too much organisational weight.
By early 2025, the company's situation had grown dire. It had burned through three CEOs in six years. It was sitting on roughly $50 billion in debt. Its stock had cratered so badly that some analysts were openly questioning whether Intel could survive as an independent company.
And then something changed. Not through a miracle chip or a lucky product launch. Through an org chart.
When Lip-Bu Tan took over as Intel's CEO in March 2025, his first major move wasn't financial. It was structural. He looked at how Intel was actually run — and decided the organisation itself was the problem that needed solving first.
