Jorge F. Negrete P.
Its mission was to “explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no man has gone before”. I am referring to the Enterprise, the mythical starship from the 1966 television series Star Trek.
The story of Intel is destined to be like that TV show, somewhere between science fiction, technological exploration, and the epic drama of a company that keeps reinventing itself. I am talking about a company that has fought the greatest technological battles “where no man has gone before.
The search for and conquest of planets has been an obsession of governments and geopolitics, especially in the 1960s, the conquest of space and the arrival to the moon. At that time, Russia and the United States started a war to prove which country would get there first. President Kennedy led this historic moment by saying, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. He immediately proposed that the United States put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Apollo 11 accomplished that goal in 1969.
A few years ago, I pointed out that the technological frontier is not the universe, but the minuscule, where we talk about atoms and nanometers. The digital world has only two pillars: the digital infrastructure that massifies and connects the digital society, and semiconductors that enable the digitization of everything.
Gordon Moore was an American businessman, engineer and visionary, co-founder and president of Intel. Between 1965 and 1975, Moore observed that the number of components on an integrated circuit doubled every two years. In other words, computing power was doubling every two years. Carver Mead, Moore’s colleague, popularized the term “Moore’s Law” to define this phenomenon.
Mead demonstrated that as transistors decreased in size, they would become “faster, better, cooler, and cheaper as they become miniaturized.” This prediction is an empirical reality in the semiconductor industry and has an impact on innovation and technological change.
Intel began an exciting journey that in the Star Trek series is referred to as Ad Astra per Aspera, which means: through difficulties, towards the stars. In this case, I take a liberty and substitute Star Trek with Intel and the phrase would read Ad Astra per Diminutum, which means: through difficulties, towards the tiny.
The semiconductor war has a long history. Much of Intel’s intellectual capital is located with its competitors and in different parts of the world. The nearshoring of processors began with the relocation of factories to Taiwan (TSMC) and Europe (ASML) for a technology developed by Intel in the design of the machines that manufacture the processors.
During President Trump’s first term, the new cold war began, which we could call “The Digital War,” and it continued with President Biden. The US wants the semiconductor industry back to its territory and does not want China to receive this technology.
The times we live in have propelled semiconductor companies to the top of the list of the largest companies in the world: Nvidia and TSMC, for example. This technology unleashes and enables Artificial Intelligence, the new digital resource of our society.
This is where the appointment of Lip Bu Tan comes in. He is the new CEO of Intel and a legend at the age of 65. Bu Tan was born in Malaysia, raised in Singapore and educated in California. He is the president of the most successful investment fund in semiconductors: Walden International, and an entrepreneur with the desire and experience to execute. He brings with him the culture of a start-up and the urgency of an investment fund to run the most iconic processor company on the planet.
In the words of Mr. Spock and his Vulcan culture, “live long and prosper”.
President of Digital Policy Law
X / @fernegretep
