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According to Pat Gelsinger, who was kicked out as Intel’s CEO late last year, the pledge of spending an extra $100 billion on the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer’s sophisticated manufacturing plant in the US will hardly help the country recover its global lead in chipmaking.
His comments were welcomed as a key milestone for bringing the production of most advanced semiconductors back to US soil less than a month after the White House welcomed investment from TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker.
“Without R&D in the US, there is no semiconductor leadership in the US,” says Gelsinger. “All the R&D work for TSMC is in Taiwan and has not been announced to make it work.”
But the former Intel chief added that President Donald Trump’s tariff threat has been “gradually beneficial” for the United States, at least by giving chipmakers like TSMC an incentive to find domestic facilities.
The Trump administration has leaned heavily towards TSMC amid doubts about Intel’s ability to regain the global manufacturing lead that lost to Taiwanese companies a decade ago.
Gelsinger’s departure later last year was widely viewed as a company’s rejection of his complicated turnaround plan, including an attempt to rebuild Intel’s manufacturing base. His successor, Lip Bou Tan, who was appointed earlier this month, has yet to set his strategy.
The former Intel CEO declined to comment on whether he dropped out with Intel’s director on strategy, but showed that he lost less than four years of confidence in his five-year plan.
“It wasn’t over five years when the board changed course,” he said.
TSMC says the only development work to be carried out in the US is about the process technology already in production, and its core research and development will remain in Taiwan.
“Unless you design next-generation transistor technology in the US, there is no leadership in the US,” Gelsinger said.
He spoke in an interview this week after becoming a partner at Playground Global, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm specializing in “Deep Tech” investments.
Despite losing out on cutting-edge process technology used in chip manufacturing, Gelsinger said the US still has a global advantage in many advanced technologies that are likely to determine future leadership in artificial intelligence.
He also dismissed the proposal that Chinese AI company Deepseek shocked US technology experts and investors earlier this year with low-cost technology.
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“DeepSeek is good engineering, not co-innovation. It wasn’t a major breakthrough,” he said.
The playground-backed startup includes Xlight. Its advanced lasers could be involved in the future generations of lithography needed to make chips. Other investments include Psiquantum, the first quantum computing company to undertake to build large quantum machines, and one of many startups trying to jump Nvidia in creating the chips needed to run AI systems, a task known as inference.
While at Intel, Gelsinger failed to compensate for the ground against Nvidia with an AI chip, but this week said new technology is needed to make AI mainstream.
“AI, it’s exciting and it’s very expensive,” he said. “We need to dramatically reduce the cost of reasoning to be truly unfolding in all aspects of humanity.”
