In a sector where talent is as scarce and consequential as silicon itself, Intel has again watched a senior executive walk out the door. Kevin O'Buckley, who served as the company's senior vice president and general manager of Intel Foundry Services, has resigned to take up one of the most operationally demanding roles at rival Qualcomm, effective 2 March. The move is the latest in a string of high-profile departures that have raised pointed questions about Intel's capacity to retain the leadership depth it needs during a critical rebuilding phase.
O'Buckley's new title at Qualcomm, executive vice president of global operations and supply chain, carries a broad remit. He will lead Qualcomm's global semiconductor operations across manufacturing engineering, foundry and supplier partnerships, supply chain, and procurement. He will report directly to Akash Palkhiwala, Qualcomm's executive vice president, CFO and COO. Qualcomm's welcome was warm: Palkhiwala described O'Buckley as bringing "deep operational expertise, proven commercial leadership, and decades of experience scaling complex semiconductor operations and delivering custom silicon products across data centre and edge devices."
Qualcomm said O'Buckley brings three decades of leadership experience from roles at Intel, IBM, GlobalFoundries, and Marvell. His background spans the full arc of modern semiconductor manufacturing, which makes the acquisition a genuine coup for Qualcomm and a genuine loss for Intel. When O'Buckley was hired in May 2024, then-CEO Pat Gelsinger said he would play a "critical role" in helping customers leverage and get the most out of Intel Foundry. That endorsement now reads as something of an inadvertent advertisement for a competitor.
Inside Intel, the organisational response has been swift. Intel Foundry will now be headed by Naga Chandrasekaran, who was previously in charge of front-end process technology development and manufacturing. As chief technology and operations officer as well as the head of Intel Foundry, Chandrasekaran now oversees both development of advanced process technologies and day-to-day execution of Intel's global manufacturing network, a consolidation of responsibilities that his predecessors did not hold. Intel has framed this as a streamlining, telling reporters that Intel Foundry remains one of the company's highest strategic priorities.
The financial backdrop to this leadership churn is sobering. Intel Foundry reported a $2.5 billion operating loss on sales of $4.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, and for the full year 2025, the unit posted a $10.318 billion operating loss on sales of $17.826 billion. Intel re-entered the foundry business in 2021, hoping to take market share away from TSMC, Samsung, and others, but has struggled and continues to lose money in the arena. Those numbers frame every executive departure as more than a personnel matter: they are signals that the market watches closely. Intel shares slid approximately 3 per cent following news of O'Buckley's exit, with the lateral move between two semiconductor powerhouses triggering an immediate market reaction.
O'Buckley's departure is not an isolated incident. It marks a further loss for Intel among executives involved with the development of the chipmaker's hardware efforts; in September last year, Intel senior fellow and chief architect of Xeon products Ronak Singhal left the company after less than a year in the role, following the departure of his predecessor, Sailesh Kottapalli, to lead Qualcomm's data centre CPU unit. November 2025 saw Intel's chief technology and AI officer Sachin Katti leave to join OpenAI to build compute infrastructure for artificial general intelligence. The pattern is difficult to ignore, even if the reasons behind each individual decision vary.
It would be too simple, though, to read all of this as evidence of terminal decline. Intel's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, who took the helm in March 2025 after the board removed Pat Gelsinger in December 2024, has moved decisively to reshape the company's culture and strategy. A couple of months after his appointment, Tan said he would consider putting future manufacturing nodes on pause if Intel could not land a major customer, a statement of hard-headed commercial discipline that contrasted with the ambitious but costly expansion plans of his predecessor. He has been more positive since, and that appears in part to reflect pressure from the US government to keep semiconductor manufacturing on American soil. The US government now holds a stake in Intel, as does Nvidia. The US government currently holds a 10 per cent stake in Intel, while Nvidia holds $5 billion of the company's stock and SoftBank invested $2 billion in the company last year.
Those external endorsements matter. Semiconductor supply chains are now a national security concern for governments well beyond Washington, including Canberra, which has flagged advanced chip technology as a critical technology of strategic importance to Australia. The concentration of advanced fabrication in Taiwan, and the geopolitical risks that come with it, means there is a genuine public interest in Intel succeeding as a US-based foundry, even if its commercial record to date gives reason for caution.
From a market perspective, Qualcomm's strategic logic is equally clear. Qualcomm is pushing ahead with plans to get more Arm-based chips into laptops, in tandem with Microsoft's push for Windows on Arm, which means O'Buckley may end up with a key role in how that all plays out. Securing an executive with deep foundry and supply chain knowledge, at a moment when TSMC capacity is in high demand and long-term contracts are required to secure it, is a calculated move. Reports of long-term contracts required to score capacity with TSMC make foundry and supplier partnerships a particularly thorny job in the current climate.
The honest assessment is that Intel faces a genuine dilemma that no single hire or departure can resolve. Its dual identity as both chip designer and chip manufacturer creates structural tensions that rivals like Qualcomm, which designs chips but relies on foundries to build them, do not share. Whether Intel Foundry will produce any of Qualcomm's future designs remains to be seen, which is a telling detail: the company that O'Buckley just left might yet become a supplier to the company he just joined. That is the kind of complex, interconnected reality that defines the modern semiconductor industry. Intel's turnaround is neither assured nor hopeless; it is a work in progress, measured in nodes, customers, and the executives who choose to stay.