By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Pat Gelsinger, the former CEO of Intel, on Wednesday joined venture capital firm Playground Global as a general partner and also joined the board of a startup working to improve a key chip manufacturing tool.
Founded in 2015, Silicon Valley-based Playground has $1.2 billion in assets under management and specializes in deep technology investments such as semiconductors. It backed AI firm MosaicML, which was sold to Databricks in a mostly stock deal for $1.3 billion last year, as well as quantum computing firm PsiQuantum, which Reuters reported is raising at least $750 million as it races to build quantum computers in Australia and the U.S.
Gelsinger, who left Intel after disagreements with its board over his turnaround strategy, told Reuters in an interview that he will be involved with 10 to 20 of Playground’s portfolio companies and focused on finding technologies that can perform at least 10 times better than the existing state of the art.
“There are no sustainable protections. You must stay on the front foot of innovation. And Playground gives me the chance to do that and do it at a broader scale,” Gelsinger said.
Gelsinger’s first move is to join the board of a Playground portfolio company called xLight as executive chairman. xLight is developing a new kind of laser to produce extreme ultra-violet light that uses far less electricity than the current lasers in lithography machines produced by ASML Holding that are the gold standard in chip manufacturing.
Gelsinger said the technology holds the promise of both boosting the number of chips that factories can make and making those chips smaller and faster – a decades-old trend known as Moore’s Law for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.
“We’ll be able to keep advancing the capacity of Moore’s Law into the future,” Gelsinger said. “And being able to have that light source being done in America – I think that is huge for us.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie Adler)
