Intel hopes its new chip can be the future of AI. An executive explains how

By Lisa Eadicicco, CNN

Las Vegas, NV (CNN) — Intel, fresh off a historic investment from the Trump administration, has a plan to radically reshape the company’s strategy.

And if you think it involves AI… You’re right.

Once the dominant player in chips, Intel has struggled to keep pace with rivals over the past decade, ceding ground to Qualcomm and Nvidia in crucial areas like mobile and AI. And while Intel is still the top maker of laptop and desktop chips, it’s facing increased competition from rivals.

Under CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took the helm last March, the company has a new turnaround plan. And it depends in part on the newly announced Core Ultra Series 3 chip, which will be in almost every major new laptop this year.

But Intel knows it needs to embed its chips in more than laptops to catch up – and potentially get ahead – in AI. That’s why its new chips will also power devices like robots as the next major area of growth for AI, Jim Johnson, head of Intel’s client computing group, said in an interview at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas this week.

“The devices between PCs and the cloud are almost infinite,” he said just after the company introduced its new chip.

Days after Intel announced the new chip, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he’d met with Tan, lauding the company for manufacturing in the United States — a reminder that the company has a powerful ally for its comeback plan.

Intel is still the top PC chipmaker by a large margin. The International Data Corporation reported that Intel accounted for more than 71% of the market in 2024 (it hasn’t published full-year data for 2025 yet).

But it’s facing increased competition from AMD, and Apple shifted away from using Intel’s chips in its MacBooks in favor of its own processors in 2020. Intel also cut 15% of its staff last year, and shares (INTC) are down more than 18% over the past five years.

Intel wants the new chip to bolster its core PC business in two ways: first, by improving non-AI qualities that PC buyers look for, like battery life; and second, by boosting performance for the ways people now use AI. That includes coding agents or video-conferencing apps like Zoom that use AI to improve call quality. The company says the new chip will power more than 200 new PC designs.

There’s no one-size-fits-all for consumers’ AI needs, Johnson said. “It’s like, what does a reporter need that may be different than what a gamer wants?”

But Intel’s rivals are moving equally as fast.

AMD announced new chips at CES that can process larger AI models on laptops without having to rely on the cloud for processing, boosting privacy and lowering lag. Qualcomm, a relatively small player in the PC market, has also been pushing more deeply into the laptop space; it announced a new laptop chip at CES that it claims will offer multi-day battery life and is optimized for AI tasks.

Intel will also have to avoid repeating its strategic missteps. That involves more than just figuring out what people want from their PCs; it also means making chips fast enough to keep up with, or surpass, rivals.

Tan is working on that, according to Johnson, who reports to him directly.

In one of their first one-on-one meetings, Tan encouraged Johnson to text him if customers were unhappy.

“(Tan) wants to know good news, bad news, problems, plans,” Johnson said.

Like other major chipmakers, Intel is betting on emerging technologies like humanoid robots for future growth. And it’s making some progress.

Oversonic Robotics, a company that makes humanoid robots for healthcare and other industries, plans to switch from Nvidia to Intel’s Core Ultra 3 chip to power its robots.

Costs were lower overall and performance was faster since Intel’s chips don’t have to connect to cloud servers to process requests, according to Intel spokesperson Nina Mehlhaf. (Oversonic Robotics still uses Nvidia’s tech to train its AI models, however.)

But Nvidia’s chips remain the beating heart of data centers powering AI services, thrusting it to the forefront of the AI boom and briefly making it the world’s first $5 trillion public company. Robots are a major part of Nvidia’s efforts. It announced new AI models for use in robotics and showcased how its tech is powering robots in healthcare and other industries at CES.

Still, the demand for humanoid robots is unclear. Bill Ray, an analyst following emerging technologies and robotics for market research firm Gartner, said deployments of humanoid robots are scarce, and they still face too many technical and physical limitations to be practical.

But Johnson remains positive about Intel’s direction, and Wall Street seems to agree. Intel shares gained roughly 84% in 2025 and are up roughly 98% year-over-year.

“I see Intel getting back in shape like it used to be,” Johnson said.

The US government took a roughly 10% stake in Intel last year, potentially giving investors some assurance about Intel’s future.

In his Thursday Truth Social post, Trump said the US government “is proud to be a Shareholder of Intel,” and reiterated his commitment to “bring leading edge Chip Manufacturing back to America.”

CNN’s John Towfighi contributed to this report.

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