An Interview with Pat Gelsinger

An Interview with Pat Gelsinger (2026)

Investing in Startups and Pushing the Boundaries

There are only a handful of people in the semiconductor industry who can genuinely claim to have lived through nearly every major shift in modern compute from the inside. Pat Gelsinger is one of them. His career stretches back through Intel’s formative decades, an era when CPU performance scaling still defined the direction of the industry, through the build-out of enterprise infrastructure and virtualization. He then came back again into the middle of one of the most difficult and closely watched rebuilds in semiconductor history. For years, I have covered Pat in different contexts: as Intel’s technologist, as the public face of its attempt to reassert manufacturing leadership, and as one of the most vocal believers that Moore’s Law. In one form or another, Pat is a stalwart in the Law continuing almost unabated. More recently, I spoke with him at Intel Foundry Connect in the middle of the “five nodes in four years” push. This conversation comes from a very different moment in his career.

Today, Pat is no longer running Intel. Instead, he is operating from Playground Global, where he has shifted to helping identify and shape the next generation of hard technology and hard physics bets. But in many ways, the themes are familiar. He is still thinking about the future of compute, he is still thinking about architectures, manufacturing, software, scaling, and he is still thinking about which new ideas have the technical depth and leadership to matter. In the interview, he describes this stage of life as focusing on things that matter, with people he enjoys, and says Playground gives him a way to stay close to companies he believes could shape the industry.

That broader perspective is what makes this conversation interesting from my point-of-view. This is not just a retrospective on Pat’s past, and it is not just a venture capital conversation either. It is a discussion with someone who has spent decades building and leading in classical compute, and who is now looking outward at AI accelerators, dataflow systems, resilient networking, quantum computing, and the growing pressure to make inference dramatically more efficient. Pat argues with me that inference still needs to improve by orders of magnitude, that the future is fundamentally heterogeneous, and that the next real breakthroughs may come from combining what he calls a “trinity of computing”: classical, AI, and quantum systems. Whether you agree with all of that or not, it is a view worth hearing from someone with Pat’s knowledge and experience.

In this interview, we talk about what changes when a former Intel CEO starts evaluating startups instead of product roadmaps, how he thinks about proof, market fit, and leadership teams, why he believes the industry is still early in the real buildout of agentic and scientific AI workloads, and where he sees the next pressure points in compute, from precision and resilience to optical links, dataflow machines, and the search for architectures that move beyond a purely von Neumann view of the world.

The following is a transcript of the video interview embedded above. Phrases have been adjusted slightly to improve readability.

Ian Cutress: We’re here at Playground Global, which is Pat’s new home. How’s it going?

Pat Gelsinger: I’ve just turned 65, and I'd say at this phase of my career, I want to do things that matter. If they succeed, it makes a difference with people I enjoy. Playground is a place I can do that.

I have about 10 companies that I’m deeply involved in right now. I’m on the board of most of those, and I think some of these are going to be industry-shaping companies. If I get to help build great companies with great leadership teams at this phase of my career, this is good. And so far this year, [although] I’m a rookie in venture capital, the team has have embraced me and we’re making a difference.

Ian Cutress: Did you ever see yourself eventually migrating into this sort of role? It’s a bit hard to go from a sustained big company sort of position into venture capital.

Pat Gelsinger: Remember, I was in the industry for 45 years! When I left Intel the first time, to EMC, literally I retired one night, and started the next morning. When I went from EMC to VMware, I literally did both jobs for two weeks. When I left VMware to come back to Intel, I did both jobs for four weeks.

It has been 45 incredible years, so after leaving Intel, my wife walks into my study literally the next day after the announcement of leaving Intel and she said, “you’re not done yet”. I think that means “don’t be home too much”! I have a little bit too much energy I guess!

That began a 100-day journey for me of figuring it out, of what do I want to do next? And I interviewed a lot of venture firms, private equity firms, a bunch of CEO roles, and government roles. It was when the Administration was coming in. University roles too, and at the end of that, I decided I wanted to make a difference, and Playground came at the top of that list.

Then there’s also my Gloo company, the faith technology company. So I’m splitting my time between the two of those. I want to make a difference eternally and make a difference in the future of science, and bring those two together. That’s a pretty good position in life.

Ian Cutress: I can’t imagine how many people came out of the woodwork to offer you advice on the next stage?

Pat Gelsinger: Lots. Of course I wanted their advice too. I had what felt like 100 meetings in a 100 days to figure out what was next - and here we are a year later and it’s going pretty well. A lot of it is in semiconductors, but you know I’m doing Alva Energy, nuclear upgrading. I didn’t know anything about nuclear energy. Now I’m doing that too.

I am learning a lot too. I’m doing superconducting, Josephson junctions and such. It’s sort of in the computing ecosystem, but wow, those are really different looking transistors from what we thought - to now worrying about cryogenics. It’s stretching my mind into quantum computing - and for a digital boolean guy for my entire life, it’s like you’ve got to turn your brain to a 90 degree angle to think about qubits and how they’re functioning and tangled and how you use them to compute. So it’s a lot of learning for me personally. I say the only disappointment I have at this phase of my career is I’m not 35 years younger! This is the greatest time to be a technologist in human history.

Ian Cutress: So in my mind I’m seeing you at a desk pouring through papers of potential startups trying to find the one that’s got something a bit unique.

Pat Gelsinger: I’m reading a lot, so lots of papers and that’s part of it. A lot of that work gets done by our associates, so I’m like that one sounds pretty interesting and they’ll seek my advice on how it would fit into the industry. They’ll go do work, we’ll meet. I like reading but even more so, I like interacting. To me, if I could read for ten hours or meet with the company for one hour, that one hour is more valuable.

Ian Cutress: So you’d rather have the college lecture?

Pat Gelsinger: Well, it’s not the college lecture. It’s the questioning, the interaction. I want a few smart people at the table. I want to ask questions and I want to hear their questions, how they respond, and that’s my best learning modality. But yeah, I mean, my brain is being stretched in so many dimensions. I’m learning about bioengineering, how semiconductors are being applied to bioscience as well.

It’s what I call the trinity of computing - the fusion of classical, AI and quantum effects coming together. I think that will be literally the problems that we will now be able to compute. Almost everything that we’ve been able to express mathematically will now become computable.