Pat Gelsinger stepped away from VMware’s board of directors on April 24, two months after he replaced Bob Swan as Intel’s chief executive officer.
As CRN reported, Gelsinger said in his resignation message that he made the decision “given the demands of his new position as CEO of Intel” and that it was a personal decision.
Intel has already made several big announcements since Gelsinger took the helm. On March 23, Intel established the Intel Foundry Services and opened up its semiconductor manufacturing to outside customers. Gelsinger said that a dedicated business division can better understand the customers’ needs and fulfil capacity commitments.
In addition, the company will be investing $20 billion in two manufacturing plants in Arizona.
Gelsinger also announced that the company has overcome the challenges around its extreme-ultraviolet lithography (EUV) process for 7nm transistors. Moreover, he promised that “a majority” of its client’s wafer starts will be on Intel’s 10nm process by Q3 2021.
VMware is also amid a massive restructure as Dell spun off 81 per cent of its stake in VMware into two standalone companies.
Gelsinger had worked at Intel for 30 years prior to becoming VMware’s CEO in 2012. He played a pivotal role in driving the company from a privately-owned data centre to a public cloud provider.