00:00 Speaker A
Trump administration is investing up to $150 million in chip startup Xlight as the company looks to develop more advanced semiconductor manufacturing techniques. The government would get an equity stake that would likely make it Xlight’s largest share holder. It’s always a good day for me when I get to talk to my next guest, Pat Gelsinger, Xlight executive chair, former Intel CEO and Playground Global General partner. Pat, good to see you, my man. Um before we even get to this this this deal structure,
00:30 Speaker A
what is X-light and what is the big breakthrough you’re looking for out here?
00:38 Pat Gelsinger
Yeah, so X-light is a new light source. And when you think about semiconductor manufacturing, you know, build big fabs, in the middle of that are these machines called lithography machines, in the middle of that is light. And light has always been the center. I always joke from my faith perspective, God said, let there be light. And for 50 years, light has been the center of the semiconductor manufacturing process. So what X-light is doing is creating a new light source.
01:21 Pat Gelsinger
A job one for us is plugging into the ASML scanners as, you know, has become the industry standard for advanced lithography and building this next generation light source. And as the photo is, you know, showing here, this is a big facility. It’s 100 meters by 50 meters that you build outside of the fab to have essentially photons as a service. You know, this new light coming into the fab and then connecting up to all of the ASML scanners or other tools in the fab. And so the breakthrough is a new
02:01 Pat Gelsinger
light source that would allow to not only be today’s light at 13.5 nanometers, but scale into the future, you know, as I call it, waking up Moore’s law.
02:15 Speaker A
Uh, Pat, I don’t know exactly how to ask this, but you’ve seen a lot of tech cycles, you’ve worked on a lot of cutting edge key technology. Is this the craziest technology you’ve ever been involved with? Because I’ve never seen anything like this before.
02:30 Pat Gelsinger
Well, you know, when I was looking for what I was going to do next, Sazi, uh, after Intel, you know, part of what attracted me to playground was this company, right? And the fact that I took on the uh uh executive chairman role for them, you know, have leaned into them very aggressively. and obviously with today’s announcement, the Department of Commerce agrees and the new Chips Program Office that this is breakthrough technology that truly can make today’s manufacturing more productive, but even more powerful than that,
03:13 Pat Gelsinger
it’s also then enabling the future of Moore’s law and allowing us to go well beyond today’s leading edge capabilities into the future. So, yeah, this is pretty uh leading edge and it leverages decades of research work that have been going on in our national labs in things like free electron lasers and particle accelerators. So it’s leveraging that technology to build this next generation light source. So really building on, you know, something that the US has been engineering in this area for many, many years
03:59 Pat Gelsinger
and now taking advantage of it to truly bring manufacturing to America and leading edge semiconductors for the American market. This is exciting.
04:14 Speaker A
Pat, uh, you know me, I’m a positive guy. I’m going to assume that Xlight is a successful venture. You’re making all these cool things by 2028. If we’re having this conversation in 2030, what does this technology mean to this country and the future of tech?
04:33 Pat Gelsinger
Yeah, well, we would want to, I say, lower the cost of manufacturing in the US, you know, be able to say, hey, we’re able to compete with other sources in the world because we have this technology enabling our manufacturing capabilities in the US. And we’ve also set a course for the most advanced nodes in the US. Research is flourishing, new companies are emerging, and we’re bringing life back to the semiconductor industry.
05:07 Speaker A
Pat, it’s not often I get to talk to someone at the top of the of a company that has just got a big investment from from the US government. I mean, this is some serious coin here, Pat. How did this all come together? And what is it like having the government as an investor?
05:27 Pat Gelsinger
Yeah. And you know, we’re excited. You know, clearly this administration was motivated to move quickly. And with that, you know, I’m thrilled with their sense of urgency in this area. You know, the discussions with the Chip’s office uh have been going on for a couple of years. Obviously, as I stepped into this role, you know, getting very active with the new leadership that came into uh place and uh you know, there’s been intense discussions over the last several months uh on the topic and obviously, uh this week’s
06:12 Pat Gelsinger
announcement was quite a thrill to have this be the first announcement coming out of the new chip’s office. So, you know, for that, we see them as acting with urgency, picking technologies like X-light that matter in a very significant way and leaning in in a big way, they’ll become a minority shareholder. Your playground, you know, our venture capital firm is the largest, but partnering with them to really, I’ll say, rejuvenate on American soil for advanced semiconductor manufacturing. This is a great day.
06:53 Speaker A
Pat, you are, you were the chip’s guy. I think I talked to you pretty much every time you came back from a trip uh champion that uh that bill or that act. What is the difference you see between this administration in terms of chip manufacturing this country compared to the prior administration?
07:13 Pat Gelsinger
You know, I see two things. One is the sense of urgency. You know, I’ve been critical that the last administration took much too long, you know, to get funds dispensed. You know, we’re competing with the world. And uh that sense of urgency. You know, and second is they’re using the full range of tools available to the government, you know, to make this occur. And that’s trade policy, that’s tariffs, you know, as well as incentives, research, you know, we need to have an all play to fully realize our objectives with reshoring
07:56 Pat Gelsinger
and rebuilding the US semiconductor manufacturing industry. This is a great step.
08:04 Speaker A
In terms of the broader uh tech land landscape, now, Pat, you’ve uh been at the highest rung of corporate America, Intel. Um, you know, I think back to where you were also leading VMWare. You know, our week started here at Yahoo Finance, seeing a a code red alert from Sam Altman and OpenAI. You know, from your CEO, you know, vantage point, would you ever issue something like that and what does something like that signal to you about the the period we are in uh AI?
08:42 Pat Gelsinger
Well, you know, I think uh, you know, I I think of AI, you know, hey, we may have finished the national anthem, but we’re still best case in the first inning. You know, we just have lots of innovation in front of us yet. You know, our chips are too power hungry, you know, the models are, you know, finding limitations of large language models, you know, we need new knowledge representations, you know, for them, every application needs to become AI infused. We’re just at the beginning. You know, that’s before we even get
09:27 Pat Gelsinger
to some of the really exciting stuff like quantum computing. So this is going to be the greatest couple of decades for technologist. And obviously for Open AI, they’ve been in an unquestioned leadership position in models. All of a sudden what Google and Gemini and now, you know, with their, you know, TPUs coming to market, you know, hey, you know, Google is roaring back, competition is a great thing. And uh we need more cost-effective AI. So some of these uh chip alternatives, you know, we’re working on new chip
10:14 Pat Gelsinger
companies that playground, you know, that will be not a little bit better but 10 or 100 x better than today’s chips. And of course, that’s before we get to new models of computation like Quantum. This is a great time to be a technologist.
10:35 Speaker A
Pat, you make a heck of a point there uh that Google is is renewed. I mean, the reviews in that new model, mind-blowing. If they’re renewed, if if 2026 is going to be the year of Google, what does that mean to OpenAI’s future? And do you share the concerns uh about circular financing? I mean, OpenAI is at the center of so many deals.
11:04 Pat Gelsinger
So, you know, hey, competition is good. And you know, I think uh quote, you know, Sam’s uh comments were waking up his organization. You know, we we we cannot presume leadership is given to us. We have to earn it every day. So I think that’s good for Open AI, good for Sam. You know, but there’s also other players, you know, obviously Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, etcetera. You know, they all need that same sense of urgency. And we have several great startups that we’re working on in this area.
11:42 Pat Gelsinger
Circular financing to me, you know, hey, big balance sheets, you know, using those balance sheets in a creative way, no problem with it. But the quality of that revenue that they’re committing in the future, simply isn’t as good, right? Because essentially, I’m buying my own future revenue. You know, that’s like saying, hmm, I have higher credit risk, you know, because rather than you putting your capital at risk, I’m putting my capital at risk. So I think in that regard, you just say, it’s just not as good as if somebody
12:21 Pat Gelsinger
else were committing that revenue, but I don’t think it’s a fundamental issue in any anyway. These are healthy companies with healthy balance sheets. You know, ultimately, we’re not going to get too far ahead of ourselves because we’re fundamentally limited by power availability. You know, as I’ve said, we’re not capital limited in AI, we’re energy committed in AI. We must build our energy grid more rapidly.
12:56 Speaker A
Pat, before I let you go, if you you of course led the uh charge to uh at Intel for uh making its own chips. Now, some people gave you a lot of guff for that, but now it looks like Apple may be using Intel to make chips. What say you?
13:19 Pat Gelsinger
Oh, I’m thrilled. If that’s the case, I’m thrilled because, you know, this agenda that, you know, we need to have Intel as a foundry, you know, for the industry, super important uh, you know, priority for me and I’m happy to see the current team continuing that and whether that’s Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD, all of them need to be building in Intel factories for the future. They need to be building more in the US and if this comes to pass, you know, that’s just the beginning. Many more need to do likewise and happy to see this
14:03 Pat Gelsinger
progress.
14:04 Speaker A
It’s still wild for me, Pat, to see Nvidia invested in Intel. I just, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t wrap my head around it. Can you wrap your head around it?
14:14 Pat Gelsinger
Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, we were well underway in those discussions when I was there. I’m happy to see that come across the line. And uh obviously, you know, you know, I I wish nothing but the best for Intel, you know, for uh Lipbu, you know, uh grateful for the time I had there. You know, but hey, I’m in a good place now, IPO-ing new companies, launching what we think are game-changing new industry capabilities and uh having a little bit more time to spend with my grandkids. So at this time of the year, that’s all that
14:52 Pat Gelsinger
matters.
14:53 Speaker A
All right. Well, enjoy, Pat. Uh, happy holidays to you, uh, you and yours. Keep fighting that good fight and we’ll talk to you soon.
15:00 Pat Gelsinger
Thank you so much.
15:01 Speaker A
I appreciate it.
