Last Tuesday evening, 85,000 Intel employees around the world joined a virtual meeting on Zoom for an update on company news directly from CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Intel’s chief executive strutted around the stage, proud as a peacock, and listed the latest achievements: higher revenue, higher profits, accelerated sales of artificial intelligence (AI) server chips, and future collaborations with Google and Elon Musk.
His basketball metaphor - "Teams, not individuals, win championships" - is well-known to employees from his previous speeches. As on the court, at Intel every employee must take good care of his or her territory, maintain profitability, ensure operational efficiency, and work just on the important stuff. Only then, with a small, lean team where everyone knows their role, will it be possible for Intel to attain its ultimate goal: supplying chips for the biggest companies in the AI sector.
Since March, the 66-year-old Tan has transformed Intel from a sinking ship into a company that is growing in the right places: selling AI processors to server farms, signing contracts with Google, Tesla and soon, possibly, Apple. In just eight months, Intel’s share price has jumped sharply from an all-time low of $20 to over $90, an all-time high.
Fewer meetings, fewer emails, fewer grades
For many Intel employees in Israel, the company's remarkable recovery begins with Tan, a nuclear engineer by training and an industry veteran who headed chip design giant Cadence for 17 years, even serving as an Intel board member before resigning in protest against actions taken by previous CEO Pat Gelsinger.
One of the first things Tan talked about upon taking office was Intel’s broken organizational culture: a mess of organizational politics, bureaucracy, diffuseness, and a general lack of focus. Too much talk and too little action.
Tan's first moves included a mass cancellation of company meetings, a reduction in the number of work-from-home days, and deep cuts to middle management -- in an organization that had already suffered mass layoffs about a year ago. Many Intel employees maintain that these moves, which had widespread support, are what brought about the turnaround at the struggling chip company.
"When Lip-Bu took on the role, the emails from senior executives to middle management, who would then rephrase things in their own words for the staff, came to an end," says a veteran employee at the company. "Lip-Bu writes directly to all employees, and that’s that. There’s no more filtering or processing. Messages now flow immediately to everyone. Everyone knows where the ship is headed, without filters and without compartmentalization."
Another long-time employee explains the differences in approach between the two managers: "Gelsinger may have had good ideas, but he didn't know how to demand them from his employees, supervise them, and be tough with them if things weren't progressing the way he wanted.
"Tan is tougher and more focused. Under him, the company is focusing on fewer products, defining what's important and what's not, and only working on what's important. If it’s not necessary, don't do it, but once you commit to meeting a schedule, you're expected to meet it, even if more money has to be poured into it."
Another employee tells "Globes" that the number of meetings has also been reduced. "Entire days go by without meetings, which is something that didn't happen here before," he says. "I find myself in corridor conversations defining tasks that used to take a series of emails and meetings."
30,000 jobs cut in a year
Since Tan took office just over a year ago, in line with the new company spirit, Intel's staff worldwide has also shrunk dramatically, from 109,000 to just 85,000 at the end of the last quarter, a decrease of 22%. In Israel, Intel has also downsized its workforce to far more modest proportions.
At its peak, Intel Israel employed about 12,000 people in development centers in Haifa, Petah Tikva, Jerusalem, and at the Kiryat Gat fab. Today, the number has already dropped to just over 8,000 employees, according to LinkedIn, representing a 30% decrease in workforce. Intel Israel now has roughly the same number of employees as it last did in 2012, even though it has since acquired three companies for billions: Mobileye, Habana Labs, and Granulate.
Everything looked different until recently
Many of the employees who remained at Intel, including long-term staffers (the average term of employment is 7.4 years) still bear scars from a difficult decade. Last year, Intel's market cap reached an all-time low, at around $80 billion.
The company's commercial and managerial failure began with veteran CEO Paul Otellini, who passed on the opportunity to have Apple’s iPhone as a customer, distanced Intel from the mobile revolution, then lost its advantage in chip manufacturing to competitor TSMC. Along the way, Intel made huge, unsuccessful acquisitions and transformed from a profitable, growing company into a gradually shrinking loss-maker that operated in less interesting markets like personal computers and server management.
The Israeli public became aware of the crisis largely because of the cutbacks that eliminated the free coffee stations in the company’s offices at the end of 2024, requiring staffers to pay for every cup they made for themselves. Many employees recall the episode as brief but embarrassing: within hours, social media were flooded with memes mocking the company, an outcome attributed to a disconnect between the leadership of the Israeli development center and Gelsinger over how to handle minor cost savings like the coffee budget.
Within a week, the coffee stations were restored. Today, an employee reports, "It's hard to walk through the office without coming across a coffee station with cakes, cookies, treats, and cold drinks."
Stock surges
A year later, those employees who remained at Intel Israel received an 8.2% raise in base salary, which increased to 10%, along with bonuses and social security contributions. Ironically, all of this came exactly one year after the coffee station episode.
But there appears to be one element in Intel’s benefits package that has made every employee the envy of the industry, against all odds. The meteoric rise in Intel stock - 153% since the beginning of the year and 355% over the past year - from a low of $20. Suddenly, the downtrodden have all become winners in paper profits.
The biggest winners are the new employees who bet on Intel at its toughest time, and were compensated for the low share price with a larger amount of shares. Intel offers a stock package worth about 12% of the average compensation for a hardware engineer in Israel, estimated at around NIS 5,000 per month, according to Levels.fyi, a real-time compensation benchmarking platform that compiles salary reports on the world’s biggest technology companies.
Those who received these shares a year ago were granted an especially large number of shares that Intel offered in order to reach a monthly threshold of NIS 5,000. With the rise in the stock price, those shares are now worth NIS 17,200. That said, new employees will not be able to fully benefit from the increase in the share value, since most of their shares were granted with a lock-up period of two or three years. Each quarter, a certain portion of the shares is released, which they can then sell. This is intended to encourage them to remain with the company over a longer period.
"Many veteran employees suffered when the share price was $20 because a significant part of their remuneration bottomed out," says an informed source. "Intel compensated them with a share package valued at $30 or $40, but when the stock didn't rise for a long time from the low point, many employees were pretty despondent. The recent increase makes it possible to bring in better talent, especially when you compare it to what your friends at Nvidia did."
According to an Intel employee, some workers even formed WhatsApp groups to bet that the stock would reach $75 or even $150, back when it was trading at just $25. "There was a belief it would get there because we felt we were doing the right thing," he says. "Not many employees sold their shares during this period; most held on to them - and still do - in the expectation that we’ll reach profitability in 2027. And if that happens, Intel’s situation will change fundamentally."
However, the employees maintain a sense of proportion. "The low of $20 per share didn't really represent the company or its potential. Now, everyone is happy about the jump, but we know that it could change at any moment."
Intel: Good results were no surprise
"We’re living this and aren’t surprised by what everyone is seeing now," says a company employee. "The last three of Intel’s chip cores were developed in Israel - and Israel is generating a great deal of revenue for the company from key areas, such as artificial intelligence."
At the development center, it’s not only that three key chip cores are being developed. Intel’s older manufacturing plant in Kiryat Gat, Fab 28, is also tied to the production of the company’s fastest-growing processors: Xeon core processors used to manage server farms specializing in AI. These are not graphics processors, but standard CPUs that have become increasingly essential because of the rise of AI agents and the shift toward training language models to operate them.
In this area, the Kiryat Gat manufacturing plant has become critical for global Intel. It is responsible for producing the previous generation of Xeon 4 processors, Sapphire Rapids, and the next generation, Xeon 6, production of which is split between Ireland and Kiryat Gat. Daniel Benatar, who initiated the plant, and has for years been one of the two leaders of the fab sector at Intel global, is a central figure at the company and considered to be close to Tan.
Don’t pop the champagne yet
But employees are well aware that even as the stock nears $100 and the Kiryat Gat plant operates at full capacity, Intel’s challenges are far from resolved. Much of the recent sales rebound is still driven by the company’s older processors, and it has yet to prove it can compete meaningfully with TSMC, which continues to produce the most advanced chips for major tech players, from Nvidia to Apple.
Intel does have a contract with Google, but the company has been serving the search giant for more than five years. Elon Musk's announcements are also a good start, but are not enough, as there are no signs that Terrafab, his and Intel's joint venture, is even close to being built.
Among analysts surveyed by "The Wall Street Journal," there has been some decline in the number of "Hold" recommendations though they still make up a clear majority: 30 analysts, compared with 12 who recommend buying. Intel’s share price has already surpassed the analysts’ target price of $94.
Judging by Intel’s network of factories, one might think they haven’t yet heard about the surge in the stock price or the improvement in the company’s condition. The company has bought back its plant in Ireland, part of which it had sold to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, but it has yet to lift the freeze on the plants it began building in Ohio and in Israel, especially after construction of facilities in Germany and Poland was canceled.
Furthermore, in Israel, Intel plans to shutter Fab 38, the new manufacturing facility it had intended to bring online in the coming months, and to freeze construction until further notice. This comes after several years of building work and an earlier decision to expand the site, which has itself been put on hold indefinitely. As a result, contractor staff were laid off, while other workers were reassigned from Intel projects to other projects.
In no rush to hire new staff
The recovery at Intel has also not yet translated into a return to hiring. There remains a gap between the steady stream of officially announced contracts and agreements and the company’s actual growth. It appears that Intel is still licking its wounds and prefers to make do with its existing workforce.
A "Globes" investigation found that only about 60 new employees were hired at Intel between February and April, most of them students or junior-level hires-university graduates with engineering degrees seeking their first step in the industry. Fewer than ten experienced employees were brought on, many of them former Intel veterans who had left for companies such as Synopsys, Qualitest, Applied Materials, or DriveNets, and returned to Intel after a short period away.
"There are quite a few veteran employees who are returning to the company - even from Nvidia- people who worked here for decades before leaving with a generous retirement package, tried their hand at other companies, but come to understand there is no equal to the work-life balance that Intel has," says a senior company employee.
"When Tan came in, a massive wave of layoffs began, larger and deeper than anything before. The previous rounds were mild by comparison and consisted mainly of voluntary departures, but under Tan the company fired those it believed needed to be fired," says an Intel manager. "But since that ended, there’s been a new spirit in the company.
"It is, of course, a chip company where any change takes place slowly, but since the restructuring, the organization has become much more stable, because when there are layoffs and people leave, the organization goes quiet and then returns to routine, and the management stabilizes. There is now a sense of shared fate, of professionalism, hard work, and focus on the goal. The feeling is that people are working harder and want the company to succeed."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on May 4, 2026.
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