Biography | Brian Krzanich — The Palazzo Ballroom Where He Said Every Chip That Year Would Be Conflict-Free

CES keynotes are built for gadgets.

On the night of 6 January 2014 the new Intel chief used part of his for a supply-chain claim.

The opening keynote of the 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show was scheduled for 6:30 p.m. in the Palazzo Ballroom at The Venetian in Las Vegas.

Krzanich had been chief executive for eight months.

He showed wearables, earbuds and a 3-D camera, the usual CES inventory.

He also told the room that every microprocessor Intel would make that year would be sourced without conflict minerals from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The four metals in the rule are tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold.

The work had started years earlier, when he was still in the supply-chain job and later as chief operating officer.

Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act had already forced listed companies to report on those metals.

Intel's claim was narrower and older than the filing: the chips themselves, not the whole catalogue of boards and boxes.

The Venetian still stands at 3355 South Las Vegas Boulevard.

The Palazzo Ballroom is a hotel room, not a factory.

The factory work that made the sentence possible had been done on other floors, in other countries, at smelters the company had spent years visiting.

Photo: The Venetian exterior, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Intel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.