Bill Gates laments Pat Gelsinger's failure to save Intel: 'I was hoping for his sake, for the country's sake that he would be successful'

As much as is it displeases me that every week seems to be 'let's rag on Intel' week, it's hard not to keep bringing up the company's utter failure to bring its manufacturing up to scratch when big dogs like Bill Gates keep talking about it. At least Gates isn't ragging—he's offering a sombre lament.

Speaking to the Associated Press, ex-Microsoft co-founder and multi-billionaire Bill Gates says he is "stunned that Intel basically lost its way", referring of course to the numerous ways that Intel's design and fabrication divisions have gone wrong.

Gates sums up Intel's general problem better than I can: "[Intel is] kind of behind in terms of chip design and they are kind of behind in chip fabrication. And both of those are very capital intensive. They missed the AI chip revolution, and with their fabrication capabilities, they don’t even use standards that people like Nvidia and Qualcomm find easy."

Pat Gelsinger returned to Intel as CEO to lead the charge of its attempted recovery back in 2021, but after apparent failure, he retired late last year. Gates explains: "I thought Pat Gelsinger was very brave to say, ‘No, I am going to fix the design side, I am going to fix the fab side.’ I was hoping for his sake, for the country’s sake that he would be successful. I hope Intel recovers, but it looks pretty tough for them at this stage."

Speaking about the "country's sake" might be hyperbole, but there's also an air of truth to it given that Intel is the United States' only large-scale advanced chip manufacturer. TSMC has been lured over with its Arizona fab, but that's still a Taiwanese company.

Intel was also for a long time somewhat unique in designing and producing its own chips. Everything is done in-house, all-American born-n-bred, baby, etc, etc. But not so of late. Now, Intel outsources manufacturing for many of its own processors to TSMC. We've seen this in Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and Arrow Lake.

Gelsinger, as an engineer himself, sought to push into the manufacturing and fabrication side of the business to try to turn things around. But big ships take time to turn, and it's not as if other manufacturers are slowing down. TSMC is already on track for 2 nm production later this year, for instance.

Intel's not completely out of the race, though, as it says its own 18A node is on track for Panther Lake laptop chips later this year. But Intel's interim co-CEO Michelle Holthaus also says that "Nova Lake [next-gen desktop chips] will actually have die both inside and outside [Intel Foundry] for that process". 18A might not be dead in the water, but as Gates says, it does look pretty tough for Intel at this stage.

Part of Gates's lamentation over this situation is probably in part, as the Associated Press points out, personal. That's because Gates' "soft spot" (as the AP says) for Intel is likely due to Microsoft's existence having sprung out of the space carved out for the company by the chip giant's first desktop processors. These, of course, benefitted from, well, software, such as Microsoft's Altair BASIC programming language for the Intel-powered Altair 8800 computer.

I can see why Intel's troubles might bother Gates, then. Even for the average consumer, the company is a staple name and it's a shame to see it struggle.

For us heartless and mercenary PC gamers, though, we still have AMD CPUs to be excited about, and they seem to be selling rather well, judging by AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su's recent comments. AMD is an American company, after all, so it's not all doom and gloom for the states. Although Intel is obviously a much bigger desktop processor operation and, unlike fabless AMD, until recently held the promise of home-grown chips.

I suppose if All-American is what you're looking for, Trump's China tariffs make sense... though I won't hold my breath.