Fresh from securing historic investment from the Trump administration, Intel has crafted a plan to radically reshape its corporate strategy. This plan is deeply intertwined with artificial intelligence. Once the dominant force in the chip industry, Intel has struggled over the past decade to keep pace with competitors, successively ceding market share in key areas like mobile and AI to Qualcomm and NVIDIA. Although Intel remains the leading manufacturer of chips for laptops and desktops, it faces intensifying competitive pressure. CEO Li-Wu Chen, who took the helm in March of last year, has charted a new course for the company's transformation, a plan that relies in part on the successful rollout of Intel's newly released Core Ultra 3 series chips. Nearly all major new laptops this year will be equipped with these processors. However, Intel is acutely aware that catching up and gaining an edge in the AI arena requires more than just a focus on laptop chips. Jim Johnson, head of Intel's Client Computing Group, stated in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week that, for this reason, the company's new chips will also power devices like robots, a sector poised to be the next major growth frontier for AI. "The number of intelligent devices between the PC and the cloud is almost limitless," Johnson said following the chip's launch. Intel continues to be the world's dominant PC chip manufacturer by a significant margin. Data from International Data Corporation shows Intel's market share exceeded 71% in 2024 (the firm has not yet released full-year 2025 data). Nevertheless, Intel is confronting increasingly fierce competition from AMD, and Apple abandoned Intel chips in its MacBook line in 2020 in favor of its own processors. Intel also cut its workforce by 15% last year, and its stock price has fallen more than 18% over the past five years. Intel hopes its new chips will strengthen its core PC business in two key ways: first, by improving non-AI performance metrics that consumers care about, such as battery life; and second, by optimizing performance for current AI use cases, including code-assistance tools or video conferencing applications like Zoom that use AI to enhance call quality. Intel stated that the new chips will provide the computing power for over 200 newly designed PCs. Johnson noted that consumer demand for AI is not a "one-size-fits-all" proposition. "It's like the needs of a journalist could be vastly different from the needs of a gamer," he said. But Intel's competitors are also accelerating their efforts. AMD unveiled new chips at CES that can run larger AI models locally on laptops, eliminating the need for cloud processing and thereby improving data privacy and reducing latency. Qualcomm, which holds a relatively small share of the PC market, continues to deepen its involvement in the laptop chip sector; the company also introduced new laptop chips at the show, boasting battery life lasting days and optimization for AI tasks. Intel must also avoid repeating past strategic missteps. This entails not only accurately gauging consumer demand for PCs but also developing chips that are fast enough to keep up with, or even surpass, those of competitors. Johnson, who reports directly to Chen, revealed that Chen is intensely focused on driving this work forward. During their very first one-on-one meeting, Chen encouraged Johnson to message him directly if any customer dissatisfaction arose. "[Chen] wants to know everything—the good news, the bad news, the problems, the plans," Johnson said. Like other leading chipmakers, Intel views emerging technologies such as humanoid robots as a significant bet for future growth and has already made some progress. Oversonic Robotics, which manufactures humanoid robots for industries like healthcare, plans to switch the computing chips in its robots from NVIDIA products to Intel's Core Ultra 3 chips. Intel spokesperson Nina Mehlhaf said this change achieves a dual benefit of lower overall costs and faster operational speed because Intel's chips can process commands without needing to connect to cloud servers. (However, Oversonic Robotics continues to use NVIDIA technology to train its AI models.) Yet, NVIDIA's chips remain the core computing power in data centers that underpin AI services, a position that has propelled NVIDIA to the forefront of the AI boom and made it the first company to briefly reach a $5 trillion market capitalization. The robotics field is also a key focus for NVIDIA, which at CES unveiled several new AI models for robotics and demonstrated how its technology empowers robots in sectors like healthcare. Despite this, demand for humanoid robots remains uncertain. Bill Ray, an analyst at Gartner covering emerging technologies and robotics, noted that there are currently very few real-world applications for humanoid robots, and they still face numerous technical and physical challenges that hinder practical, large-scale deployment. But Johnson remains confident in Intel's direction, and Wall Street appears to share that sentiment. Intel's stock climbed approximately 84% in 2025, with a year-over-year increase of about 98%. The U.S. government's acquisition of roughly a 10% stake in Intel last year may have further bolstered investor confidence in the company's future. "I can see Intel getting back to its former glory, step by step," Johnson said.