Intel

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An Intel D915GUX desktop motherboard, introduced in the mid-2000s for PCs using Intel processors.

Copyright Intel Corporation

Intel is a leading American manufacturer of semiconductor computer circuits. It is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and its stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol INTC. The company’s name comes from integrated electronics.

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Robert Noyce (left) and Gordon Moore in front of the Intel SC1 building, Santa Clara, California, 1970.

The Intel Free Press

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(From left to right) Andrew Grove, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore, 1978.

The Intel Free Press

Intel was founded in July 1968 by American engineers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Unlike the archetypal Silicon Valley start-up business with its fabled origins in a youthful founder’s garage, Intel opened its doors with $2.5 million in funding arranged by Arthur Rock, the American financier who coined the term venture capitalist.

Intel’s founders were experienced, middle-aged technologists who had established reputations. Noyce was the coinventor in 1959 of the silicon integrated circuit when he was general manager of Fairchild Semiconductor, a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument. Moore was the head of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor. Immediately after founding Intel, Noyce and Moore recruited other Fairchild employees, including Hungarian-born American businessman Andrew Grove. Noyce, Moore, and Grove served as chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) in succession during the first three decades of the company’s history.

Intel’s initial products were memory chips, including the world’s first metal oxide semiconductor, the 1101, which sold poorly. But its sibling, the 1103, a one-kilobit dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chip, was successful and the first chip to store a significant amount of information. It was purchased first by the American technology company Honeywell Incorporated in 1970 to replace the core memory technology in its computers. Because DRAMs were cheaper and used less power than core memory, they quickly became the standard memory devices in computers worldwide.

Following its DRAM success, Intel became a public company in 1971. That same year Intel introduced the erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) chip, which was the company’s most successful product line until 1985. Also in 1971, Intel engineers Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, and Stan Mazor invented a general-purpose four-bit microprocessor and one of the first single-chip microprocessors, the 4004, under contract to the Japanese calculator manufacturer Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation, which let Intel retain all rights to the technology.

Not all of Intel’s early endeavors were successful. In 1972 management decided to enter the growing digital watch market by purchasing Microma. But Intel had no real understanding of consumers and sold the watchmaking company in 1978 at a loss of $15 million. In 1974, Intel controlled 82.9% of the DRAM chip market, but, with the rise of foreign semiconductor companies, the company’s market share dipped to 1.3% by 1984. By that time, however, Intel had shifted from memory chips and become focused on its microprocessor business: in 1972 it produced the 8008, an eight-bit central processing unit (CPU); the 8080, which was 10 times faster than the 8008, came two years later; and in 1978, the company built its first 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086.

In 1981, the American computer manufacturer International Business Machines (IBM) chose Intel’s 16-bit 8088 to be the CPU in its first mass-produced personal computer (PC). Intel also provided its microprocessors to other manufacturers that made PC “clones” that were compatible with IBM’s product. The IBM PC and its clones ignited the demand for desktop and portable computers. IBM had contracted with a small firm in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft Corporation, to provide the disk operating system (DOS) for its PC. Eventually Microsoft supplied its Windows operating system to IBM PCs, which, with a combination of Windows software and Intel chips, were dubbed “Wintel” machines and have dominated the market since their inception.

Of the many microprocessors Intel has produced, perhaps the most important was the 80386, a 32-bit chip released in 1985 that started the company’s commitment to make all future microprocessors backward-compatible with previous CPUs. Application developers and PC owners could then be assured that software that worked on older Intel machines would run on the newest models.

With the introduction of the Pentium microprocessor in 1993, Intel left behind its number-oriented product naming conventions for trademarked names for its microprocessors. The Pentium was the first Intel chip for PCs to use parallel, or superscalar, processing, which significantly increased its speed. It had 3.1 million transistors, compared with the 1.2 million transistors of its predecessor, the 80486. Combined with Microsoft’s Windows 3.x operating system, the much faster Pentium chip helped spur significant expansion of the PC market. Although businesses still bought most PCs, the higher-performance Pentium machines made it possible for consumers to use PCs for multimedia graphical applications such as games that required more processing power.

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Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on a computer chip was doubling about every 18–24 months. As shown in the logarithmic graph of the number of transistors on Intel’s processors at the time of their introduction, his law was being obeyed.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Intel’s business strategy relied on making newer microprocessors dramatically faster than previous ones to entice buyers to upgrade their PCs. One way to accomplish this was to manufacture chips with vastly more transistors in each device. For example, the 8088 found in the first IBM PC had 29,000 transistors, while the 80386 unveiled four years later included 275,000, and the Core 2 Quad introduced in 2008 had more than 800 million transistors. The Itanium 9500, which was released in 2012, had 3.1 billion transistors. This growth in transistor count is known as Moore’s law, named after company cofounder Gordon Moore, who in 1965 predicted that transistor counts on silicon chips would double about every year. He later revised it in 1975 to every two years..

To increase consumer brand awareness, in 1991 Intel began subsidizing computer advertisements on the condition that the ads included the company’s “Intel inside” label. Under the cooperative program, Intel set aside a portion of the money that each computer manufacturer spent annually on Intel chips, from which Intel contributed half the cost of that company’s print and television ads during the year. Although the program directly cost Intel hundreds of millions of dollars each year, it had the desired effect of establishing Intel as a conspicuous brand name.

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An Intel Pentium 4 processor (detail of die photo) contains more than 40 million transistors.

© Intel Corporation

Intel’s famed technical prowess was not without mishaps. Its greatest mistake was the so-called Pentium flaw, in which an obscure segment among the Pentium CPU’s 3.1 million transistors performed division incorrectly. Company engineers discovered the problem after the product’s release in 1993 but decided to keep quiet and fix the problem in updates to the chip. But mathematician Thomas Nicely of Lynchburg College in West Virginia also discovered the flaw. At first Grove (then CEO) resisted requests to recall the product. But when IBM announced it would not ship computers with the CPU, it forced a recall that cost Intel $475 million.

Although bruised by the Pentium fiasco, the combination of Intel technology with Microsoft software continued to crush the competition. Rival products from the semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the wireless communications company Motorola, the computer workstation manufacturer Sun Microsystems, and others rarely threatened Intel’s market share. As a result, the Wintel duo consistently faced accusations of being monopolies.

By the mid-1990s Intel had expanded beyond the chip business. Large PC makers, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, were able to design and manufacture Intel-based computers for their markets. To help smaller PC makers bring their products—and Intel’s chips—to market faster, Intel began designing and building motherboards with all the essential components, including graphics and networking chips. By 1995, the company was selling more than 10 million motherboards to PC makers, about 40% of the overall PC market. In the early 21st century the Taiwan-based manufacturer ASUSTeK had surpassed Intel as the leading maker of PC motherboards.

In 1999, Microsoft was found guilty in a U.S. district court of being a monopolist after being sued by the Department of Justice, while in 2009 the European Union fined Intel $1.45 billion for alleged monopolistic actions. In 2009, Intel also paid AMD $1.25 billion to settle a decades-long legal dispute in which AMD accused Intel of pressuring PC makers not to use the former’s chips.

By the end of the century, Intel and compatible chips from companies like AMD were found in every PC except Apple Inc.’s Macintosh, which had used CPUs from Motorola since 1984. Craig Barrett, who succeeded Grove as Intel CEO in 1998, was able to close that gap. In 2005, Apple CEO Steven Jobs shocked the industry when he announced future Apple PCs would use Intel CPUs. Therefore, with the exception of some high-performance computers, called servers, and mainframes, Intel and Intel-compatible microprocessors can be found in virtually every PC, and the company dominated the CPU market in the early 21st century.

In 2005, Paul Otellini succeeded Barrett as Intel’s CEO, and four years later Jane Shaw replaced Barrett as chairman. But even as Intel appeared strong from the outside, signs of strain were emerging. Smartphone makers were bypassing Intel chips, delays plagued new manufacturing processes, and rivals like AMD began regaining ground in the PC market. A once-unshakable lead was starting to look vulnerable.

Shaw held the post until 2012, when she was succeeded by Andy Bryant. The following year Brian Krzanich became CEO. In 2019, chief financial officer Bob Swan became CEO, and Intel ranked 43 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest American companies.

Amid increasing competitive pressure, Swan was replaced in 2021 by Pat Gelsinger, a former Intel executive and VMware CEO. Gelsinger sought to revitalize Intel’s technology leadership, but ongoing challenges, including delays in product development and growing competition in the semiconductor industry, led to his departure in 2024.

In March 2025, Intel named Lip-Bu Tan as CEO, bringing extensive experience in the semiconductor industry and corporate leadership. The following month, Intel agreed to sell a 51% stake in Altera—a programmable-chip company it had acquired for $16.7 billion in 2015—to private equity firm Silver Lake for $4.46 billion as Tan sought to streamline the company and strengthen its finances.

In August, Tan attracted further scrutiny when President Donald Trump publicly called for his resignation, labeling him “highly conflicted” because of his extensive investment ties to Chinese tech companies amid intensifying national security concerns. After Tan reaffirmed his commitment to U.S. interests in a letter to employees and met with Trump at the White House, the president reversed his position and praised him as a respected leader.

Later in August 2025, the U.S. government secured a 10% stake in Intel through an $8.9 billion investment funded by previously awarded but unpaid federal grants and incentives—primarily from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and related programs—receiving 433.3 million shares of nonvoting stock valued at $20.47 each, a 17.5% discount to the then-market price. The transaction made the federal government one of Intel’s largest shareholders, although it carried no voting rights or board representation. Officials described the deal as a strategic effort to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing rather than as a bailout.

The agreement came as Intel faced mounting financial and competitive pressures. Since 2023, the company had recorded losses exceeding $22 billion and planned to lay off more than 20,000 workers. Its market capitalization had fallen to about $108 billion to $110 billion, more than 60% below its peak and far below the valuation of rival NVIDIA (NVDA), which surpassed $4 trillion in July 2025. Analysts and policymakers debated the implications of government ownership of Intel. Some likened it to the U.S. Treasury’s intervention in General Motors (GM) during the 2007–08 financial crisis, while others warned of risks to market independence and corporate governance.

More changes followed the U.S. government investment. In September 2025, NVIDIA agreed to invest $5 billion in Intel as part of a partnership in which Intel would design custom processors to work with NVIDIA chips in personal computers and data centers. The following month, Intel unveiled chips made with Intel 18A, an advanced manufacturing process that allows more transistors to be packed onto chips while improving performance and energy efficiency.

Intel faces competition from rivals such as AMD and NVIDIA as the semiconductor industry shifts toward artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. Despite its challenges, the company remains a key player in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

Tim Jackson, Inside Intel: Andy Grove and the Rise of the Most Powerful Chip Company (1997), is a critical look at how Intel management aggressively reached market dominance. Robert A. Burgelman, Strategy Is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company’s Future (2002), contains a case history of Intel and makes the point that strategic thinking by top management is critical for business growth and success. Robert S. Tedlow, Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American (2006), is a flattering but informative biography of Intel’s third CEO and chairman.