In comeback push, Intel shores up engineering team

Embattled chipmaker Intel Corp. on Wednesday announced a series of aggressive leadership changes in a move to put engineering at the heart of its strategy.

Greg Ernst, who has led Intel’s sales and marketing since May and previously headed sales across the Americas, has been appointed chief revenue officer and will continue reporting to CEO Lip-Bu Tan.

Intel has also named Srinivasan Iyengar senior vice president and fellow to lead a new customer engineering center of excellence, making him part of the executive team and a direct report to the CEO.

Prior to this, Iyengar led global silicon engineering at Cadence Design Systems and has experience with custom silicon for hyperscale data centers.

The company appointed Jean-Didier Allegrucci vice president of AI System-on-Chip (SoC) engineering, tasking him with overseeing development of multiple SoCs on Intel’s AI roadmap.

Before joining Intel, Allegrucci worked at Rain AI and previously spent 17 years at Apple, where he led development of more than 30 SoCs.

Meanwhile, Shailendra Desai has been named vice-president of AI fabric and networking.

Desai is expected to oversee SoC architecture development for Intel’s AI GPUs and future products.

Desai previously was with Google, where he led silicon engineering and platform design. He also founded Provino Technologies, a startup acquired by Google in 2021.

Allegrucci and Desai will report to Sachin Katti, Intel’s chief technology and AI officer.

“We see significant opportunities ahead to strengthen our product offerings and meet the changing needs of our customers,” Tan said. “Greg, Srini, J-D and Shailendra are highly accomplished leaders with strong reputations across our ecosystem, and they will each play important roles as we position our business for the future.”

The shuffle in Intel’s leadership comes after Bloomberg recently reported that the company has been planning to slash 20% of its workforce to reduce operating costs to $17 billion in 2025 and $16 billion in 2026.

In its April earnings report, Intel posted first-quarter revenue of $12.67 billion, surpassing market expectations of $12.3 billion.

Despite the strong quarterly performance, the company issued weak guidance for the second quarter because of global uncertainty in semiconductor demand. Intel warned that the downturn could extend into a economic slowdown.