Intel’s new chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, is focusing on improving the execution of the company’s existing strategy rather than making major changes, chief financial officer Dave Zinsner said.

“The strategy is the strategy — we’ve got to execute better,” Zinsner said at JPMorgan Chase’s Global Technology, Media and Communications conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

“It’s a fair assessment that Lip-Bu isn’t thinking about massive changes,” he said.

Gradual shift

Zinsner said the only area where Tan is planning to make significant shifts is in Intel’s AI chip strategy.

The comments indicate that Intel is not planning to split off its manufacturing division and bring in outside companies to help run it, a possibility for the troubled company that has been widely reported in recent weeks.

Intel is unique amongst major chip manufacturers in that it designs and produces its own chips, rather than outsourcing production to a third party such as Taiwan’s TSMC.

The company has been moving for years toward becoming a contract chip manufacturer itself, and opening up its plants to outside customers.

Zinsner indicated Tan is not planning to divert from this path.

He said that so far Tan has thinned out Intel’s layers of management so that a true picture of the “good, the bad and the ugly” could get through to leadership.

Intel is also continuing to try to bring in more outside customers, he said, but so far volumes remain low.

Foundry customers

The volume of chips Intel is set to produce for outside customers using its most advanced technology, known as 14A, is currently “not significant”, he said.

But he said customers are currently testing chips on the platform, something Intel had indicated last month.

“We get test chips, and then some customers fall out of the test chips… So committed volume is not significant right now, for sure,” Zinsner said in comments reported by Reuters.

Reports in March said Nvidia and Broadcom were running manufacturing tests with Intel’s foundry division.

Zinsner said the foundry unit is on track to break even sometime in 2027 and would require external customers to generate low to mid-single digit billions of dollars in revenue to achieve that.