This Former Intel CEO Wants to Jumpstart Moore’s Law With Light

departed Intel as CEO in late 2024, he held 100 meetings in 100 days. The idea, he told WIRED recently, was to whittle down his options until he figured out what to do next.

The following March, Gelsinger announced that he had taken a position as general partner at Playground Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in deep tech, taking bets on fledgling technologies built on new science.

Gelsinger took the role with the aim of helping a new generation of semiconductor startups reawaken Moore’s law. Decades ago, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double roughly every two years, with a corresponding leap in performance. That held true for a long time, but as semiconductor firms press the limits of physics, further shrinking atomic-scale transistors has become prohibitively difficult and expensive.

Gelsinger believes the best way to break that impasse is through advances in lithography—etching chips using nanometer-scale beams of light. The leading lithography technology, developed by the Dutch company ASML, lets chip manufacturers print using 13.5-nanometer wavelength light. The ability to cram in more, even smaller features, the logic goes, would unlock even more powerful processors.

When he joined Playground, Gelsinger took a board seat at xLight, a portfolio company developing novel lithography techniques that also recently received investment from the US government. (When we spoke, Gelsinger repeatedly offered the phrase, “God said, ‘Let there be light!’”)

As artificial intelligence upends the software industry, more and more VC firms are shifting toward deep tech. But few, Gelsinger contends, are better equipped than he is to spot the winners.

WIRED met Gelsinger in early July at the RAISE Summit conference in Paris. We discussed his process for vetting deep tech founders, the US government’s shifting stance on AI and semiconductors, and why breakthroughs in those fields necessarily come hand in hand.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: Roughly four months separated your departure from Intel and arrival at Playground. What was going through your head during that period?

PAT GELSINGER: My wife said, “You’re not done yet.”

I was looking at government roles, university roles, CEO roles, private equity, venture. It was really a deductive process. I decided I didn’t want to do [any more] public earnings calls. I didn’t see myself as a politician. It came down to private equity or venture.

I want to do things that matter—that if they succeed, make a difference—with people I enjoy.

Why did you decide against private equity?

Private equity writes bigger checks, but it’s not as focused on the tech. At this phase of my career, do I want to write big checks and worry about financial returns, or do I want to do cool tech?

We’re at the edge of science, proving things out. That’s always the kind of person I’ve been. I love tech.

A bunch of VCs are shifting toward deep tech in response to the disruption of the software industry by AI. What’s your take on how AI is changing where the next investment opportunities appear?

The door has blown wide open.

In 2024, the semiconductor industry aimed to hit a trillion dollars by 2030. Now, we’ll hit a trillion dollars next year. I don’t need my companies to win the market to get extraordinary returns. I just need them to win a decent percentage. That’s what AI has done to deep tech venture.

The good news is that a lot of venture firms are swinging in that direction. The bad news is that, for the most part, they’ve forgotten how to do deep tech—how to pick the winners and losers.

What’s your process for assessing the credibility of deep tech founders, when sometimes the physics behind their inventions hasn’t yet been proven?

Our investment team is deeply technical—they’re engineers, PhDs, professors, etc. Then we go through a rigorous tech diligence process: lots of interviews, and background checks. What’s the hard problem? Can they articulate it in depth?

We’re looking to fund the best team—not a team—on a given topic.

But to what extent are those checks even possible, when the ideas behind these startups are sometimes pressing the limit of scientific understanding?

Generally, when you see deep tech things emerge, there’s usually two or three companies gravitating to that idea. Very rarely do you find the dodo bird. Then you’re asking, ‘Am I picking the best one?’

Tell me about the bets you’re making at Playground. You’ve taken a board seat at xLight.

One of the reasons I joined Playground was because of xLight. Those are the kind of companies I want to work on, because I’m deeply invested in making the semiconductor industry the future—waking Moore’s law from its nap.

If we solve light, that is the hardest problem. Can I move past 13.5-nanometer light? That’s the next breakthrough. With free-electron lasers, we could go [smaller], to 5-, 4-, 3-, 2-nanometer wavelength light.

xLight is not versus ASML, it’s with ASML. The first thing we want to do is hook our light source up and make ASML machines better. It doesn’t get better than that.

You think lithography is the key to reawakening Moore’s law, more than processor design?

Light is the most important thing. God said, “Let there be light.” We’re going to harness that as far as we can take it.

There’s a variety of things percolating in the space—new material structures, superconducting, ferroelectric materials—but all of them need lithography. It’s always been the center of semiconductors. If I wake up lithography, that’s thrilling.

It’s a pretty exhilarating period of human history. For a technologist, it doesn’t get better than this.

What do you make of the wave of semiconductor startups trying to challenge Nvidia in AI inference—and this vision of a future where processors from a multitude of vendors harmonize inside a single system?

We train models once, we use them many [times]. There will be a swing toward inference. And it’s very clear we could do a lot better.

Obviously, training has been the heartland of GPUs. But even Nvidia recognized that its GPUs were not a great fit for all inferencing. [E.g. the Groq deal.]

My job at Playground is to make AI 10,000 times better, not 10 times. That will happen on chips that don’t look like today’s GPUs.

I think that model vendors are trying to abstract themselves from the underlying hardware, too. They’re trying to make it easier to have a heterogeneous hardware structure underneath.

What about memory?

High-bandwidth memory is a problematic technology. It’s the best we have right now. But by the end of the decade you’ll start to see stacked memory architectures will become much more dominant. d-Matrix, Fractile, and Cerebras are breaking the boundaries of what memory architectures will look like.

I believe that some of these hardware innovations are going to be 10 to 100X better. That means one gigawatt produces 10 gigawatts worth of tokens. I’ll take that deal any day.

You’ve previously described energy as one of the main bottlenecks to progress in AI. Where does investment need to be made in order to rectify that problem?

In the US, we’ve had low-single-digit expansion in energy capacity in the last decade. That’s despicable. In a digital AI age, energy capacity is economic capacity. I don’t want to be anti-climate, but we were so consumed with climate that we forgot about capacity.

We have to start looking at how to turn on energy expansion. But it’s really a conundrum: New gas turbines have an eight-year supply chain; nuclear takes a decade to build; solar [depends on] Chinese supply chains.

One of my companies, Alva Energy, is doing nuclear upgrading. Let’s take the fast path—harvesting more value from today’s nuclear footprint—but also let’s reignite the nuclear build.

This is an area that needs innovation, because fundamentally the winners and losers in the AI age will be those with the energy capacity to build their systems.

The final piece is to make AI a lot more efficient—the chips, power distribution. We have a number of companies working in voltage regulation and conversion. It’s about looking at the whole stack.

When you joined Playground, you said you wanted to extend US leadership and ensure the benefits of AI are evenly distributed. Recently, there have been signs—in the form of chip export controls and interventions in the release of AI models—that the US administration is willing to wield its leadership as leverage. Against that backdrop, I wonder whether those two ambitions might become mutually exclusive?

There’s yin and yang on these types of topics. But fundamentally, I don’t view those in dissonance.

If I had the choice of the US or China having leadership in foundational models, which would I pick? The US, of course. I want the models to be based on our values, to enhance human experience, to solve many of the world’s hardest problems. This is a race we want Western nations to win.

It seems like the US administration can’t decide whether to be maximally hands-off in regulating AI or maximally hands-on, dictating which models can be widely released.

This is just moving so fast. A major foundational model is being released every four weeks. Against that backdrop, do I need to regulate? What do I need to regulate? What are the quality and security requirements for these models? These are valid questions.

We’re figuring it out in real time, because things are moving so rapidly. One of the things that gives me solace is that we’re debating it.

But what’s your stance? Should models be reviewed by an American government body before release?

Models need to have integrity of process and visibility of the testing that was done on them. I want to know what proprietary foundational models are trained on. I want vigorous benchmarking. I want to know they’re not just the first to do something, but they do it with the appropriate security requirements and values alignment.

One of two things needs to happen: Either the industry does that review, or the government has to step in to make sure it gets done.