Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang 'got lucky' with AI

The former boss of Intel attended NVIDIA's AI-focused GTC 2025 conference in San Francisco, California. In a 'Live at NVIDIA GTC' video appearance, ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger shared some words about NVIDIA's meteoric rise in recent years, thanks to the current AI boom. Aimed at NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Geslinger says, "he got lucky with AI" - and it's not a dig.

The fortunes or fall of Intel under Pat Gelsinger's stewardship have been widely reported. In 2025, the once-dominant force in consumer and enterprise processor hardware is now playing catch-up to companies like NVIDIA and AMD. Regarding NVIDIA being the leader in AI, Pat Gelsinger also talked about Intel's failed Larrabee project, which attempted to bring GPU-like acceleration for things like AI to a traditional x86 CPU.

"The CPU was the king of the hill, and I applaud Jensen for his tenacity of just saying, 'No, I am not trying to build one of those'; I am trying to deliver against the workload starting in graphics," said Gelsinger.

"You know, it became this broader view," Geslinger added. "And then he got lucky with AI, and one time I was debating with him, he said, 'No, I got really lucky with AI workload because it just demanded that type of architecture.'"

"I had a project that was well known in the industry called Larrabee and which was trying to bridge the programmability of the CPU with a throughput-oriented architecture, and I think had Intel stayed on that path, you know, the future could have been different," Gelsinger opined during his appearance on the webcast. "I give Jensen a lot of credit; he just stayed true to that vision."

In the broadcast, Pat Geslinger also discussed the rising costs of AI hardware, stating that it is "way too expensive"- 10,000 times more than it needs to be for AI and large-scale inferencing to reach its full potential. As for Intel, the next-generation Jaguar Shores project in its AI GPU division will arrive sometime in 2026, competing against next-gen offerings from both NVIDIA and AMD.