Jorge F. Negrete P.

Its mission was to “explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no man has gone before”. I am referring to the Enterprise, the mythical starship from the 1966 television series Star Trek.

The story of Intel is destined to be like that TV show, somewhere between science fiction, technological exploration, and the epic drama of a company that keeps reinventing itself. I am talking about a company that has fought the greatest technological battles “where no man has gone before.

The search for and conquest of planets has been an obsession of governments and geopolitics, especially in the 1960s, the conquest of space and the arrival to the moon. At that time, Russia and the United States started a war to prove which country would get there first. President Kennedy led this historic moment by saying, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. He immediately proposed that the United States put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Apollo 11 accomplished that goal in 1969.

A few years ago, I pointed out that the technological frontier is not the universe, but the minuscule, where we talk about atoms and nanometers. The digital world has only two pillars: the digital infrastructure that massifies and connects the digital society, and semiconductors that enable the digitization of everything.

Gordon Moore was an American businessman, engineer and visionary, co-founder and president of Intel. Between 1965 and 1975, Moore observed that the number of components on an integrated circuit doubled every two years. In other words, computing power was doubling every two years. Carver Mead, Moore’s colleague, popularized the term “Moore’s Law” to define this phenomenon.

Mead demonstrated that as transistors decreased in size, they would become “faster, better, cooler, and cheaper as they become miniaturized.” This prediction is an empirical reality in the semiconductor industry and has an impact on innovation and technological change.

Intel began an exciting journey that in the Star Trek series is referred to as Ad Astra per Aspera, which means: through difficulties, towards the stars. In this case, I take a liberty and substitute Star Trek with Intel and the phrase would read Ad Astra per Diminutum, which means: through difficulties, towards the tiny.

The semiconductor war has a long history. Much of Intel’s intellectual capital is located with its competitors and in different parts of the world. The nearshoring of processors began with the relocation of factories to Taiwan (TSMC) and Europe (ASML) for a technology developed by Intel in the design of the machines that manufacture the processors.

During President Trump’s first term, the new cold war began, which we could call “The Digital War,” and it continued with President Biden. The US wants the semiconductor industry back to  its territory and does not want China to receive this technology.

The times we live in have propelled semiconductor companies to the top of the list of the largest companies in the world: Nvidia and TSMC, for example. This technology unleashes and enables Artificial Intelligence, the new digital resource of our society.

This is where the appointment of Lip Bu Tan comes in. He is the new CEO of Intel and a legend at the age of 65. Bu Tan was born in Malaysia, raised in Singapore and educated in California. He is the president of the most successful investment fund in semiconductors: Walden International, and an entrepreneur with the desire and experience to execute. He brings with him the culture of a start-up and the urgency of an investment fund to run the most iconic processor company on the planet.

In the words of Mr. Spock and his Vulcan culture, “live long and prosper”.

President of Digital Policy Law

X / @fernegretep

Jorge F. Negrete P.

The digital frontier is not heading towards the sky, but towards the tiny. JFN.

China, every time it moves, has to look back at its 3,500 years of history. The United States was born looking to the future. Today, Europe looks to China and the United States.

The USA, in its short history, has fought the most important technological battles in our contemporary society. The most important? The battle of the chips, the processors.

The power of this industry baptized a geographic and economic region of the United States: Sillicon Valley, and was born under success, first military after the Vietnam War, and later with the consumer electronics market. They have faced Asia twice. First against the Japanese in the late eighties and mid-nineties, with the powerful electronics industry of Fuji, Cannon and Sony, and now against China.

On both occasions, a processor law from Congress was vital. Every digital product has a processor or chip, as its heart. Electronics, consumer goods, cars, airplanes, computers, ships, military weapons, radars, smartphones and the aerospace industry. The security of the United States, the West and the world depends on chips.

Processors are the basis of computing and supercomputing. Telecommunications networks have a single purpose, to release massive amounts of data and computing processes. Chips and networks have never been so close together.

Artificial Intelligence is agnostic and the natural daughter of processors and telecommunications networks. There is no Artificial Intelligence or robust telecommunications networks without chips.

For decades, transistors, spliced to large electronic boards, were concentrated by the hundreds and thousands inside floors and computer rooms. Today, the new generation of chips can place more than 290 million transistors per square millimeter, and Intel aims to manufacture chips with one million million transistors by 2030. We are talking about 3NM (nano millimeters) processors. Science fiction via deep ultraviolet lithography.

Intel aims for Artificial Intelligence everywhere, which reaches the cloud, the laptop, edge computing (I call it neighborhood data centers) and mobile devices. This already unleashes the largest and most dizzying race for the control of Artificial Intelligence via the design of computing processors, called neuromorphic, resembling human neuronal capacity.

President Biden added massive amounts of radio spectrum to the equation. Intel envisions a silicon economy, already worth $600 billion and contributing $1 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

The axiom is: telecommunications networks + neuromorphic chips + spectrum = computing capacity = Artificial Intelligence.

Greece is the basis of the West with its philosophy, its reflection on politics and its mythological and literary fiction, Rome, under the premise of its civilizational and legal expansion; the Middle Ages rescuing Rome and Greece in monasteries; and the Renaissance, with its creative explosion, the basis of contemporary Western aesthetics. Thousands of years giving marrow to the cultural body of the West may pale with the arrival of Artificial Intelligence. The West and the entire world will not be the same.

In this digital renaissance, Latin America and Mexico are in the best capacity to conquer a privileged place in the territory of economic, cultural, scientific and technological development. The value chain of processors needs to increase value and we are indispensable. Mexico designs chips and processors, the United States manufactures, Costa Rica assembles and distributes.

In global geopolitics, manufacturing processors is preparing a generation of engineers, consultants, analysts, companies, and transversal economic activities, vital for the 21st century, above any other economy.

Are we ready for the Digital Renaissance?