Intel, fresh from a historic investment by the United States President Donald Trump administration, has unveiled a strategy aimed at radically reshaping the company’s future.

Once the dominant force in the chip industry, Intel has struggled to keep pace with competitors over the last decade, losing ground to Qualcomm and Nvidia in critical areas such as mobile and artificial intelligence. While the company remains the leading maker of laptop and desktop chips, competition is steadily increasing.

Under the leadership of CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who assumed the role last March, Intel has launched a new turnaround plan. Central to this strategy is the newly announced Core Ultra Series 3 chip, which is set to be included in nearly every major laptop release this year.

Intel, however, recognises that success requires expanding beyond laptops to establish a foothold in AI. The company intends to power a variety of devices, including robots, as the next growth frontier for artificial intelligence, Jim Johnson, head of Intel’s client computing group, stated during an interview at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas.

“The devices between PCs and the cloud are almost infinite,” he said immediately following the introduction of the new chip.

Days after the announcement, former President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he had met with Tan, praising Intel for producing chips in the United States, signalling a powerful ally for the company’s comeback plan.

Intel continues to dominate the PC chip market by a wide margin. According to the International Data Corporation, Intel held over 71% of the market in 2024, although full-year figures for 2025 have not yet been released.

Despite this, the company faces growing challenges from AMD and the fact that Apple transitioned away from Intel chips in 2020 to its own processors for MacBooks. Intel also reduced its workforce by 15% last year, and its shares (INTC) have declined more than 18% over the past five years.

The new chip is intended to strengthen Intel’s core PC business in two key ways: by improving non-AI qualities that matter to PC users, such as battery life, and by enhancing performance for contemporary AI applications, including coding agents and video-conferencing apps like Zoom. Intel expects the Core Ultra Series 3 to power more than 200 new PC designs.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all for consumers’ AI needs,” Johnson said. “It’s like, what does a reporter need that may be different than what a gamer wants?”

Intel’s competitors are moving rapidly as well. At CES, AMD unveiled new chips capable of processing larger AI models directly on laptops, reducing reliance on cloud servers, improving privacy, and lowering latency. Qualcomm, a smaller player in the PC market, also showcased a laptop chip designed to deliver multi-day battery life and optimised for AI workloads.

Intel is also addressing past strategic errors, which involves more than understanding consumer preferences; it requires producing chips fast enough to surpass competitors.

Tan is personally involved in this process, Johnson noted, reporting directly to the CEO. During one of their first one-on-one meetings, Tan instructed Johnson to text him whenever customers expressed dissatisfaction.

“(Tan) wants to know good news, bad news, problems, plans,” Johnson said.

Like other leading chipmakers, Intel is investing in emerging technologies such as humanoid robots as part of its future growth strategy. Progress is already being made.

Oversonic Robotics, a company producing humanoid robots for healthcare and other sectors, plans to adopt Intel’s Core Ultra 3 chip instead of Nvidia’s for its robots.

Intel spokesperson Nina Mehlhaf explained that costs were lower overall and performance was faster because Intel’s chips do not rely on cloud servers for processing requests. Oversonic Robotics, however, continues to use Nvidia technology for training its AI models.

Despite Nvidia’s dominance in AI data centers and its brief emergence as the world’s first $5 trillion public company, Intel is positioning itself in robotics. Nvidia also presented new AI models for robotic applications and demonstrated its technology in healthcare robots at CES.

The market for humanoid robots, however, remains uncertain. Bill Ray, an analyst at Gartner focusing on emerging technologies and robotics, noted that deployments are limited and technical and physical constraints continue to challenge practical use.

Johnson remains confident in Intel’s trajectory, and Wall Street appears optimistic as well. Intel shares rose roughly 84% in 2025 and are up approximately 98% year-over-year.

“I see Intel getting back in shape like it used to be,” Johnson said.

The US government acquired a roughly 10% stake in Intel last year, potentially reassuring investors about the company’s future.

In his Thursday Truth Social post, Trump said the US government “is proud to be a Shareholder of Intel,” and reiterated his commitment to “bring leading edge Chip Manufacturing back to America.”