A sign is posted in front of Intel’s headquarters on August 1, 2024 in Santa Clara, California.
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Intelligence is working with advisors including Morgan Stanley to help protect itself from activist investors, according to people familiar with the matter, as CEO Pat Gelsinger tries to turn around the struggling chipmaker.
While Intel has faced activist pressure in the past, no new campaign has been formally launched, and it’s unclear whether any activist investors have contacted the company’s board. Morgan Stanley has worked with Intel in the past, including on the company’s 2022 spinoff. Cellular phone.
Sources familiar with Morgan Stanley’s latest involvement asked not to be identified for confidentiality reasons. Representatives for Intel and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
Intel lost its title as the largest US chipmaker by revenue last year, as by Nvidia The boom in the artificial intelligence industry has propelled the company to the top. Nvidia has long surpassed Intel in market capitalization and is now valued at over 3 trillion dollarsmaking it about 35 times larger than its smaller rival. Intel has also fallen behind. Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, Qualcomm And Texas Instruments by market capitalization
Earlier this month, Intel announced that the company would cut about 15% of its workforce, or 15,000 jobs, as part of a $10 billion cost-cutting plan. At the same time, the company reported quarterly results that fell short of Wall Street estimates and said it would not pay a dividend in its fiscal fourth quarter.
Intel’s biggest challenge recently has been that it has fallen behind in the AI race, as major cloud providers and language model developers turn to Nvidia GPUs for their most demanding workloads. Before the AI craze, Intel largely missed out on the smartphone boom.
In 2020, before Gelsinger took over as CEO, Dan Loeb’s Third Point took a significant stake in Intel and pushed the company to explore strategic alternatives to address market share slippageIntel’s board is led by Frank Yeary, a prominent investment banker who previously served as executive chairman of Camberview before it was acquired in 2018.
The board went through some upheaval this week, as Lip-Bu Tan, a veteran of the semiconductor industry, announced on Thursday that he would step down after just two years as director.
“This was a personal decision based on the need to re-prioritize various commitments and I remain supportive of the company and its important work,” Tan said in a statement. submit application.
— CNBC’s Alex Sherman and Kif Leswing contributed to this report.
