Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan sat down with CNBC’s Jim Cramer to talk about Apple; Intel 14A rivaling TSMC's top chip production technology; Shortages of CPUs and substrates; and the state of Intel's turnaround. How to know when Intel signs Apple or other foundry customers: Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan: “Over time, the IP will be ready so we can serve some of these customers. I think the best indication, when you see I increase my capex, I’m putting money to buy equipment, that means I have real customers. That’s the discipline I have.” Intel 14A manufacturing process and EMIB-T advanced packaging: Intel CEO: “(A14) is 1.4nm, this is the most advanced. To be candid with you, in 2028 we will have risk production. 2029 will be volume production. It will be the same time as TSMC. So that is a major, major breakthrough, and I’m so excited. And we already have multiple customers engaged with us, and we have 0.5 PDK available.” Taking advantage of TSMC’s CoWoS shortage Intel CEO: “Our technology is called EMIB-T, this is the next generation of advanced packaging. We really have the best technology and now we are making sure we can bring it into volume production with reliable yield so the customer can count on us.” CEO: “You know, CoWoS…(TSMC) ran out of capacity, so in a way we’ve become in the unique position to support that and that’s something we are very excited (about).” Shortages of CPUs and Substrates CEO on the CPU shortage: “I’ll give you one example. I had one customer say Lip Bu, we gave you the forecast for this year, but we want to increase 3x, and I say I cannot do it overnight but give me a few quarters and I will catch up. So, I think this demand is not short term, it’s the next couple of years. It’s a great opportunity.” CEO: “Right now, as I mentioned, CPU is in high demand. And that’s good for me. I cannot even ship enough to the customer. It used to be the CPU to GPU ratio for training was 1-to-8. And now, because of inference and agentic AI, and more agents you have to manage, and orchestration, and reinforced learning, CPU is actually better, so that becomes 1-to-4 and 1-to-1 and some people even talk about 4-to1, and so that’s a huge opportunity to me to drive the CPU....” CEO on Substrates: “A couple of customers have prepaid for substrates, because the substrate supply chain is very tight – so I need to put up the money to secure this material…(and it shows) the commitment to me – so that’s very exciting.” Intel’s Turnaround CEO: “We used to have leadership in data center, and over the years we lost it…We made some big mistakes,” he said, adding he’s brought back some talent to refocus the product lines and that “Coral Rapids will have multi-threading, and will come out very strong.” CEO: “When I took over, the 18A yield was not good, so I had to ask some of the ecosystem partners to help me look at the data, see how to improve. The best practice is to see 7% or 8% yield improvement per month, and now I’m seeing it.” CEO: “The other part is supposed to be the yield performance, defect density, you know at the end of the year to see the target. Now I see that even before the end of the year – so that is very big encouragement for me and also that’s why Panther Lake can be shipped in volume now. And now some customers knock on my door and say Lip Bu, now we hear you are making great progress, can you now open up to outside customers? So that is very exciting. It’s a lot of hard work, it’s a lot of teamwork, it’s a lot of talent I’ve brought on board.” CEO: “In the past we made a lot of mistakes and now we correct the mistake and we’ve simplified the roadmap. By the way, from Day 1 I came on board as the CEO, I have all the engineers report to me so I have an understanding, hear from the customer, and know where are the mistakes.” Cramer: “They didn’t report to the previous CEO?” CEO: “No. And in a way, they had too many silos, too many people reporting…So I decided, the best thing is to really understand where the problem is, so I can focus on the engineering, how to redesign, simplify the product and then get the real killer products out.” Cramer asks about China, Taiwan and the importance of US manufacturing: CEO: “I was very glad for President Trump understanding the strategic importance for the United States to have (chip manufacturing supply chain) and their support is so valuable to me – it’s so critical for the country to have the technology, R&D development, manufacturing in the United States. That’s why I came back in, as a U.S. citizen – as a calling – to do that.” CEO: “From time to time I update President Trump and also (Sec.) Howard Lutnick and they are big supporters of me and we are delighted to have their support.” Going forward: CEO: “I recruited some key talent…and now, by the end of June, I will have my team, what I consider my team, so that we can work on the next 5-years, 10-years, how to become a different company. I call it the New Intel, work at the speed of light, work as a team to progress forward.” $INTC $TSM #Samsung# $UMC $GFS #semiconductors#

The power of AI agents comes from: 1. intelligence of the underlying model 2. how much access you give it to all your data 3. how much freedom & power you give it to act on your behalf I think for 2 & 3, security is the biggest problem. And very soon, if not already, security will become THE bottleneck for effectiveness and usefulness of AI agents as a whole (1-3), since intelligence is still rapidly scaling and is no-longer an obvious bottleneck for many use-cases. The more data & control you give to the AI agent: (A) the more it can help you AND (B) the more it can hurt you. A lot of tech-savvy folks are in yolo mode right now and optimizing for the former (A - usefulness) over the the latter (B - pain of cyber attacks, leaked data, etc). I think solving the AI agent security problem is the big blocker for broad adoption. And of course, this is a specific near-term instance of the broader AI safety problem. All that said, this is a super exciting time to be alive for developers. I constantly have agent loops running on programming & non-programming tasks. I'm actively using Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and very carefully experimenting with OpenClaw. The only down-side is lack of sleep, and an anxious feeling that everyone feels of always being behind of latest state-of-the-art. But other than that, I'm walking around with a big smile on my face, loving life 🔥❤️ PS: By the way, if your intuition about any of the above is different, please lay out your thoughts on it. And if there are cool projects/approaches I should check out, let me know. I'm in full explore/experiment mode.

How we prompt AI is very different in 2026 than 2022 when ChatGPT came out. I'm teaching a new course, AI Prompting for Everyone, to help you become an AI power user — whatever your current skill level. It covers skills that apply across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools. How to use deep research mode for well-researched reports on complex questions. How to give AI the right context, including more documents and images than most people realize you can provide. When to ask AI to think hard for several minutes on important decisions like what car to buy, what to study, or what job to take. And how to use AI to generate images, analyze data, and build simple games and websites. I also cover intuitions about how these models work under the hood, so you know when to trust an answer and when not to. Along the way, you'll see flying squirrels, a creativity test, some of my old family photos, and fireworks. Join me at

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want. The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?" Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain. As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain. One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan. My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it. Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism. This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate. Now how does this all get to the role of the EF? EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter. This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward. And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally. This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself) EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects). At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting. To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose. I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like: * Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this. * Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash. * Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future. Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%. Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations. The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support. EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.