Intel announces key executive shake-up within the leadership team

At a time when CEO Lip-Bu Tan intensifies efforts to turn around the struggling U.S. chipmaker, Intel announced a series of top executive changes on Monday. This includes the departure of products chief Michelle Johnston Holthaus, who will leave after more than three decades with Intel. She will however, remain a strategic adviser over the coming months. The CEO reportedly seeks to flatten the company’s leadership team, with most important chip groups reporting directly to him.

In addition, the chipmaker has announced a series of senior leadership appointments that support the company’s strategy to strengthen its core product business, build a trusted foundry, and foster a culture of engineering across the business.

Kevork Kechichian has joined Intel as executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group (DCG). In this role, he will lead Intel’s data center business across cloud and enterprise, including the Intel Xeon processor family.

Kechichian brings more than 30 years of industry experience, and joins Intel from Arm, where he most recently served as executive vice president of engineering. His previous leadership roles include senior engineering positions at NXP Semiconductors and Qualcomm.

Jim Johnson has been appointed senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Client Computing Group (CCG), after successfully serving in the role on an interim basis. He will lead Intel’s efforts to deliver innovative computing solutions and foster growth across the global PC and edge ecosystems.

A 40-year Intel veteran, Johnson has held various engineering and leadership roles across the company, including in the Technology and Manufacturing Group, the Networking and Communications Group, and general manager of several global businesses and manufacturing plants.

Intel is also establishing a new Central Engineering Group led by Srinivasan (Srini) Iyengar, a senior vice president and Fellow. In his expanded role, Iyengar will lead horizontal engineering functions and build a new custom silicon business to serve a broad range of external customers.

Iyengar joined Intel in June from Cadence Design Systems, where he led global silicon engineering. He brings deep technical expertise in custom silicon development and has worked closely with hyperscale data center customers to optimize solutions for key workloads.