Under the guidance of the new executive chief Chen Liwu, Intel, the large processor manufacturer, has transformed into a cool and cool stage. Intel announced another $2.9 billion in the second quarter financial report and continued to cut 15%. The latest move is to split the Internet and the Neighbors Operations Department (NEX) into independent businesses, comprehensively and accurately core businesses, and to split all businesses that do not meet Chen Liwu's "AI Priority" number.
Tom's Hardware reports that it forgets to outline Intel's idea of finding new strategic investors for the NEX department, and Intel will continue to be a fundamental investor, just like the previous sale of the Altera department of the editable logical chip division, which makes the NEX department, which works on Ethernet and Communications infrastructure, now plans its future development direction. Sachin Katti, executive director and current AI business owner of Intel, said that with Intel's support, this new independent business will accelerate its strategy and product blueprint for customers through faster innovation and investment in new products.
For Chen Liwu, the NEX spin-off symbolizes a larger change in business philosophy, that is, Intel withdraws from all irrelevant x86 and AI businesses. In the second quarter financial conference, Chen Liwu described Intel as an overly expanded and inefficient company, and pointed out that he would lay off employees to 75,000 employees, a figure that was more than 30,000 fewer than in early 2025. In addition, the OEM expansion plan that has been expending huge amounts of money will be reduced. Chen Liwu warned that if Intel fails to acquire any important external customer, the next generation Intel 14A may be cancelled at all and the advanced production market will be handed over to Taitel and Samsung.
At least, the blueprint of Intel core CPU development is still in accordance with the plan, including the Intel 18A production Panther Lake series processors released at the end of the year, focusing more on AI performance and re-introducing hyper-execution into P core. In terms of servers, the Granite Rapids series processors are also being carried out, competing with AMD EPYC for its dominant position in the market for high-performance computing. After the NEX department was split, Intel hopes to focus on the key market and reduce the profitable departments.
Intel sold 51% of Altera shares to private equity fund Silver Lake Capital at the beginning of the year. The NEX department will follow suit to eliminate Intel's bureaucratic restrictions, but the time has caused investors to doubt whether Intel can stabilize its finances and maintain artificial intelligence and semiconductor competition. Chen Liwu once admitted that Intel is much behind in this regard.
No surprise, Intel's stock price fell 8% after the second quarter financial report was released. The NEX division split showed that Chen Liwu strongly reorganized the company, which has significantly changed its business strategy. But whether the action can work depends on whether Intel implements AI strategies and provides competitive x86 products. The most important thing is whether you can find partners to maintain the success of your process.