Pat Gelsinger

Gelsinger's Intel tenure is the most expensive lesson in AI hardware: having the manufacturing ambition and government backing isn't enough if you can't crack NVIDIA's CUDA moat. Gaudi was technically competent but arrived in a market where the entire AI software ecosystem was already written for NVIDIA GPUs. The CHIPS Act facilities he secured will matter for decades of US semiconductor independence, but that's a national security legacy, not a commercial AI one. Intel under Gelsinger proved that in AI compute, software ecosystem lock-in beats silicon specs every time.