Intel loses another exec as datacenter, AI chief named Nokia CEO

Intel is going to need more than a new CEO after its Datacenter and AI (DCAI) chief on Monday announced he's leaving to run Nokia as its next chief executive.

Justin Hotard, who took over as EVP and GM of Intel's DCAI business just over a year ago, will replace Pekka Lundmark as Nokia's president and CEO on April 1, the Finnish telecommunications vendor said in a statement.

"I want to thank my team at Intel Corporation for their work in stabilizing the Datacenter and AI Business over the last year. I wish them continued success as they continue their journey," Hotard shared in a LinkedIn post on Monday.

Hotard joined Intel in early 2024 after former DCAI head Sandra Rivera was tapped to lead its newly spun-off Altera FPGA business. With more than eight years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, most recently as EVP and GM of its High-Performance Computing, AI, and Labs division, Hotard was expected to help turn around Intel's struggling DCAI unit.

During his brief tenure, Hotard oversaw Intel's Sierra Forest E-core and Granite Rapids P-core Xeon 6 platform launches. Up to this point, Intel's Xeons had lagged rival AMD, reinforcing its reputation for too little, too late.

As we reported, at the time, Intel's Xeon 6 launch represented something of a return to form with the chipmaker briefly reclaiming core-count parity with its long-time rival for the first time since 2017.

Yet, over the past few weeks, DCAI has faced its share of setbacks. Today's announcement comes just over a week after interim co-CEOs Michelle Johnston Holthaus and David Zinsner announced the delay of Intel's next-gen Clearwater Forest Xeons and scrapped the release of its Falcon Shores accelerators to prioritize a future, rack-scale platform called Jaguar Shores.

Citing weaker-than-expected demand, Clearwater Forest will now make its debut sometime in the first half of 2026 rather than this year as originally planned. And that's not the only blow to Intel's Xeon team in the past few weeks.

Last month, Intel fellow Sailesh Kottapalli left the biz after 28 years to join Qualcomm. Kottapalli was the driving force behind many of Intel's Xeon server processors.

Brain drain isn't the only challenge: In a year in which rival AMD managed to ship over $5 billion of Instinct accelerators, Intel's Gaudi AI accelerators failed to do a 10th of that, falling short of the $500 million target former-CEO Pat Gelsinger had forecasted early last year.

Intel had hoped its third-gen Gaudi accelerators, announced at its Vision event last April, would help it win share from those looking for a cheaper alternative to Nvidia's H100 and H200. Unfortunately, by the time anyone could actually buy them, Nvidia's Blackwell and AMD's MI325X accelerators were already making their way to customers.

Now, with Gaudi3's successor relegated to a test chip, Intel won't have a competitive AI accelerator to match Nvidia or AMD until at least 2026.

"We have a strong DCAI team that will continue to advance our priorities in service to our customers," Intel said in a statement provided to The Register. "We are grateful for Justin Hotard's contributions and wish him the best in his new role."

In Hotard's place, Intel has tapped Karin Eibschitz Segal to lead DCAI on an interim basis. According to her LinkedIn page, Segal is an 18-year Intel veteran having served in multiple engineering roles prior to her appointment as co-CEO of Intel Israel in 2023.

However, finding a permanent head of DCAI probably isn't Intel's top priority at the moment. Two months after Gelsinger's abrupt "retirement," the x86 giant has yet to find a new captain to steer the ship.

During the outfit's Q4 earnings call last month, Intel had little to share on the search. "The board remains intensely focused on the search for a permanent CEO," Zinsner said at the time. "The search is progressing, but we have nothing new to report."

Following the call, rumors emerged that GlobalFoundries CEO Thomas Caulfield, who announced he would step down and transition to Executive Chairman, might be in the running for the role. While speaking at the UBS technology conference in early December, Zinsner did say the next Intel CEO would have foundry expertise. Whether or not Caulfield will be the one to supply that knowledge remains to be seen. ®