Lip-Bu Tan was appointed chief executive officer of Intel Corporation in March 2025. He also serves on the company’s board of directors.
Business Wire / AP
Layoffs are looming at Intel as the semiconductor giant looks to shave half a billion dollars in operating expenses.
In a letter to employees on Thursday, the chipmaker’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan wrote that critical changes are coming that will reduce the size of Intel’s workforce.
“Our competitors are lean, fast and agile — and that’s what we must become to improve our execution,” Tan said.
Intel is one of Oregon’s largest private employers with more than 20,000 workers. The company considers its campus in Hillsboro as the heart of its research and development arm.
Once the world’s top chipmaker, Intel fell behind in the race to develop technology for the boom in artificial intelligence and is now working to catch up. To do this, Tan told investors on a Thursday earnings call that the company needs to fundamentally change its internal culture and the way it operates.
“Organizational complexity and bureaucracies have been suffocating the innovation and agility we need to win,” Tan said. “It takes too long for decisions to get made. New ideas and people who generate them have not been given the room or resources to incubate and grow. The unnecessary silos have led to bad execution. I’m here to fix this.”
It’s the second year in a row the chipmaker has had to cut staff. Intel said in August it would slash around 15,000 workers worldwide — including 1,300 in Oregon — as part of a larger plan to cut costs. The company reported a loss of nearly $19 billion last year, after recording a $1.7 billion profit in 2023.
Still, the federal government awarded Intel $8 billion last year to expand its domestic manufacturing, including $1.8 billion to upgrade parts of the Hillsboro campus. But it takes years to build new facilities.
Tan told investors that small areas of growth in recent months hint that Intel is heading in the right direction.
“Our goal now is to build on this progress, but it won’t be easy,” Tan said. “There are many areas we need to improve and there’s no quick fixes.”
Correction: a previous version of this story incorrectly stated Intel’s 2023 earnings. The chipmaker made nearly $1.7 billion in 2023.
