Former Intel CEO has high praise for Nvidia months after stepping down

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has praised Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, for what he calls two “critical” strategic decisions that have placed the company at the forefront of the AI revolution.

Speaking at a recent episode of Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid, Gelsinger acknowledged Nvidia’s position as the current leader in the AI chip market. The former CEO’s comments may come as a shock for some, given that Gelsinger just left his position at a competing chipmaker, Intel, in December 2024.

Nvidia’s two winning strategies

According to Gelsinger , one of the things that makes Nvidia stand out from the competition is how it executes. He said the company is executing well under the leadership of Jensen Huang, saying, “At the end of the day, Jensen is on it — driving his teams to stay in the front end.”

Nvidia’s second winning strategy, according to Gelsinger, is building meaningful moats. He said the chipmaker has maintained a sustainable advantage over the competition through two major products, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) and NVLink, a high-speed interconnect for GPU and CPU processors in accelerated systems. CUDA allows developers to fully leverage Nvidia’s GPUs, effectively locking them into the Nvidia ecosystem

Gelsinger’s comments reflect a growing industry consensus: Nvidia , once primarily known for gaming graphics cards, is now the leading company powering AI and data center technology. Under Huang’s leadership, the company has become a trillion-dollar business, with its stock surging over the past year thanks to the AI boom.

Intel continues to play catch-up

Some may see Gelsinger’s comments as Gelsinger throwing in the towel in the AI chipmaking race, given that he served as Intel’s CEO from 2021 until 2024. As Intel’s CEO, Gelsinger was tasked with restoring the company to its previously held position of market dominance in the chipmaking industry by upgrading its manufacturing edge, having lost some ground to AMD, Samsung, and, most recently, Apple.

However, Intel continued to fall behind rivals like AMD and Nvidia, with their share price dropping by nearly 50% in 2024, to which Gelsinger responded with mass layoffs and employing other drastic measures. He stepped down and was succeeded by Lip-Bu Tan, a renowned semiconductor veteran and former CEO of Cadence Design Systems.

Tan has since pledged to move Intel toward a stronger future, informing customers that Intel will improve while leveraging their honest feedback.

However, Gelsinger’s recent comments highlight the scale of the challenge and the bar Nvidia has set.. It also marks a shift in tone, as legacy players acknowledge the importance of new paradigms in hardware-software integration for AI.

Ironically, Gelsinger has in the past attributed Nvidia’s success to luck and being at the right place at the right time, and is known to have thrown some digs at Huang in the past.

Thanks to its early investment in accelerators, which are specialized chips that power artificial intelligence workloads, Nvidia has gone on to dominate the hardware infrastructure market for generative AI tools and large language models like ChatGPT, where speed and performance are critical, and demands increase every minute as AI startups continue to spring up everyday, leaving other chipmakers like intel who used to dominate the market in the 2000s to play catch up.

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