Trump’s punches against Intel’s new CEO land a direct hit — widening the opening for the tech giant’s strongest rivals

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan addresses the Intel Vision 2025 conference last March.

Intel Corp. finds itself in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar position: While the chipmaking giant undergoes a painful restructuring under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan, its rivals are mounting their most significant assault yet on Intel’s core markets.

Qualcomm Inc. is pushing aggressively into Windows PCs and making a surprise return to data-center processors. Arm Holdings, meanwhile, is squeezing more revenue from its ecosystem through price increases while contemplating an even more radical move of making its own chips to compete directly with licensees.

This two-pronged attack hits Intel at a vulnerable time. The company is slashing 15% of its workforce, shelving fab expansion plans and scrambling to fix product missteps such as removing hyper-threading from server chips. With Intel consumed by internal fixes, Qualcomm and Arm sense a real opportunity to capture market share in the PC and server business that Intel has dominated for decades.

Adding to the pressure, Tan has come under fire from President Donald Trump, who last week called for the CEO to be fired — but on Monday praised Tan’s “amazing” rise and success following a White House meeting with the tech giant’s leader.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Intel’s next generation of processors, Panther Lake for laptops and Granite Rapids for servers, must deliver flawlessly when they launch over the next 12-18 months. Any stumbles in execution would accelerate the industry’s shift toward non-x86 architectures, potentially relegating Intel from industry leader to just another player in an increasingly crowded field.

Painful reset

Intel’s second-quarter results revealed the depth of its challenges. Revenue remained flat at $12.9 billion while the company absorbed $1.9 billion in restructuring charges, driving another quarterly loss. But the numbers only tell part of the story. Under Tan, who took over last March, Intel is fundamentally rethinking its approach to both manufacturing and product development.

The new CEO has halted Intel’s aggressive fab expansion, acknowledging the company “invested too much, too soon, without adequate demand.” Plans for mega-fabs in Germany and Poland have been shelved, while construction in Ohio is slowing. Going forward, Intel will only build capacity tied to concrete customer commitments — “No more blank checks,” as Tan put it bluntly.

Perhaps more concerning are Intel’s product admissions. The company conceded that dropping hyper-threading from recent server chips left them at a competitive disadvantage, a remarkable acknowledgment of a strategic error. Intel will reintroduce the feature in its upcoming Xeon processors, but the damage to customer confidence may already be done.

Tan has instituted personal oversight of all major chip designs before tape-out, signaling how critical the next product cycle has become. Panther Lake for notebooks and Nova Lake for desktops represent the company’s attempt to regain its footing, built on the new 18A process technology. These chips simply must succeed.

Qualcomm pushes beyond mobile

While Intel retrenches, Qualcomm is executing an ambitious expansion strategy that targets Intel’s traditional strongholds. It has made notable progress in Windows PCs, with CEO Cristiano Amon revealing that its Snapdragon processors now power roughly 9% of premium Windows laptops (those above $600) in the U.S. and Europe. That’s nearly one in 10 high-end Windows notebooks running on Qualcomm rather than Intel’s x86 architecture — a share that was virtually zero just a few years ago.

Qualcomm’s confidence is evident in its target of $4 billion in annual PC chipset revenue by 2029. The company’s acquisition of startup Nuvia in 2021 provides the technology foundation for this assault, with new Snapdragon X Series laptop chips promising performance and battery life that rival both Apple Inc.’s M-series and Intel’s best offerings.

Even more surprising is Qualcomm’s return to the data-center market. After abandoning its Centriq server CPU project in 2018, the company has confirmed plans to re-enter the space through a partnership developing AI-centric data centers in Saudi Arabia, among others. This initiative positions Qualcomm to compete for cloud and AI workloads where power efficiency, the company’s traditional strength, increasingly matters.

The strategic implications are clear: Qualcomm is no longer content with dominating smartphones. It’s leveraging its architecture and designs to attack markets where Intel has long been entrenched, capitalizing on Intel’s current weakness to establish beachheads that may prove difficult to dislodge later.

Arm makes a play for Intel’s ecosystem

Every dollar Arm extracts from the ecosystem is a dollar that strengthens Intel’s competition.

Arm poses a different but equally serious threat to Intel. Under CEO René Haas, Arm is aggressively monetizing its position as the architect of the instruction set powering most of the world’s devices outside PCs and servers. The company has been negotiating price increases of up to 300% for its chip designs, aiming to boost annual revenue by $1 billion over the next decade.

This matters for Intel because every dollar Arm extracts from the ecosystem is a dollar that strengthens Intel’s competition. Higher royalties from Arm’s new Armv9 architecture, now in everything from iPhones to an increasing number of server chips, provide more resources for the Arm ecosystem to invest in challenging Intel’s remaining strongholds.

More concerning is Arm’s reported consideration of designing its own chips. While Arm has traditionally been neutral, licensing its technology only, the company has “discussed designing its own chips” to showcase its technology. If Arm moves forward with this plan, it could create reference designs for high-performance processors that directly compete with Intel in servers or high-end computing, essentially providing a blueprint for others to follow.

This shift would fundamentally alter the competitive landscape. Instead of Intel competing against individual Arm licensees, it could face Arm itself as a competitor — backed by the full weight of the ecosystem it created. For Intel, this represents a nightmare scenario where the entire ecosystem becomes more coordinated in its assault on x86 architecture.

The next 18 months will decide Intel’s future

Organizational changes and cost cuts alone won’t stop rivals. Only great products, delivered on time, can do that.

Intel’s upcoming product launches have never been more critical. Panther Lake and Granite Rapids aren’t just new chips, they’re an answer to an existential threat. If these processors deliver on their promises, Intel could stabilize its market share and demonstrate that x86 still has advantages in performance and compatibility that Arm can’t match.

But if Intel stumbles again, if the 18A process disappoints, if Panther Lake arrives late, if Intel Xeon can’t match AMD’s Epyc or Arm-based alternatives, the consequences would be severe. PC manufacturers already experimenting with Qualcomm would accelerate their adoption. Cloud providers would expand their use of custom Arm chips or alternatives from Ampere and others. The trickle of defections could become a flood.

Tan, Intel’s CEO, described his turnaround plan as creating a “new Intel for a new era.” But organizational changes and cost cuts alone won’t stop rivals. Only great products, delivered on time, can do that. Intel is essentially racing to prove its technology leadership before Qualcomm and the broader Arm ecosystem capture too much territory to dislodge.

For the first time in its history, Intel faces coordinated competition across all its major markets. The next year will reveal whether the company’s restructuring and renewed focus on execution can preserve its position, or whether the rise of non-x86 in PCs and servers marks the beginning of a fundamental shift in the semiconductor industry’s balance of power.