Biography | Pat Gelsinger — Named Intel CEO from This Campus, 13 January 2021

People treat an Intel succession as a speech in a convention hall.

This one was a Santa Clara press release.

On 13 January 2021 Intel's board appointed Pat Gelsinger chief executive, effective 15 February, and seated him on the board the same day he took the job.

He would succeed Bob Swan, who stayed until 15 February.

Gelsinger was then chief executive of VMware, the Palo Alto virtualization firm he had run since September 2012.

He had left Intel in 2009 after thirty years, the last stretch as the company's first chief technology officer.

The appointment pinned him back to the same Santa Clara campus he had entered in 1979 as a technician II.

The public building on that campus is the Robert Noyce Building at 2200 Mission College Boulevard.

Intel framed the change as a need for engineering depth during a period of process delays and lost share.

He held the job until 1 December 2024, when the company said he had retired and left the board.

The four-year return is a separate last chapter. This memory is the announcement that brought the 1979 hire back as chief executive.

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Cody Glenn / Web Summit, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.