Dev Patnaik
Too many leaders fall into the same trap. They notice something shifting at the edges—new technology, changing customer behavior—and it sparks anxiety. But instead of acting, they retreat into the comfort of day-to-day operations.
If I told you back in 2010 that a scrappy maker of graphics chips for video games would bail out Intel, you’d have laughed me out of the room.
And yet, that’s what happened last month. On September 18, Nvidia announced a $5 billion investment in Intel, tossing a lifeline to the struggling icon and instantly becoming one of its largest shareholders.
The moment was surreal for those of us who’ve spent time in Silicon Valley. Fifteen years ago, Intel was untouchable. It had a near-monopoly on central processing units, the brains inside every personal computer on the planet. It commanded almost 15% of global semiconductor revenue. It even billed itself as “putting the silicon in Silicon Valley.” At that time, Intel’s market cap was ten times bigger than Nvidia’s. Sure, mobile computing was chipping away at its dominance. But still…this was Intel.
And yet, Nvidia’s $5 billion power play wasn’t a sudden disruption. It’s the culmination of a story that’s been unfolding for two decades. The signs were always there…if you were willing to look.
Back in the early 2000s, Nvidia was a niche player beloved by hardcore gamers. Its GPUs were great for rendering graphics, but not much else. Then, in 2006, Nvidia released the Compute Unified Device Architecture. This software toolkit lets engineers stitch GPUs together into parallel computing workhorses. And while some execs at Intel took notice, most saw it as a mere curiosity.
Missing the Moment
Three years later, a team of Stanford researchers proved otherwise. They published a paper entitled “Large Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning Using Graphics Processors”. The paper showed that GPUs could crush CPUs at deep learning tasks. Suddenly, a lot of work in AI research wasn’t theoretical anymore—it was feasible. Nvidia moved quickly to support this new market for its chips. Intel continued to focus on CPUs.
And then the bomb went off.
In 2017, researchers at Google invented the Transformer. In a groundbreaking paper entitled “Attention is All You Need“, the team proposed a new deep-learning architecture that was far more powerful than older recurrent neural networks. That breakthrough would power large language models and launch the modern Age of Artificial Intelligence. Nvidia was ready. Intel wasn’t.
Over the course of twenty years, Intel execs watched as the world changed around them. By 2016, they were publicly acknowledging the rising importance of AI and GPUs. They recognized that machine learning would be a driving force in their data center and cloud businesses. But they never broke from the gravitational pull of their CPU business. For them, AI was a side hustle.
Meanwhile, Intel started to stumble in manufacturing, losing ground to TSMC and Samsung. By contrast, Nvidia remained “fabless,” focusing on semiconductor design and relying on TSMC to build its chips. The rest is history.
The Trap We All Fall Into
It’s tempting to treat Intel’s failure as an industry-specific cautionary tale. It isn’t. Too many leaders fall into the same trap. They notice something shifting at the edges—new technology, changing customer behavior—and it sparks anxiety. But instead of acting, they retreat into the comfort of day-to-day operations.
I once met a food company exec who bragged about his consumer insights team. “There isn’t a single industry trend in the last twenty years that we haven’t seen coming,” he crowed. That didn’t strike me as a good thing. After all, if he’d seen it all coming, why didn’t he do something about it?
At the turn of the century, the term “information overload” was widely used to describe the feeling of being overwhelmed by excessive data, numerous signals, and complexity. Interestingly, it’s not a term you hear much these days, even though the wave of information overwhelm has turned into a tsunami. Perhaps we’ve just gotten used to things.
My theory is that we’ve traded information overload for something even more disorienting: crisis overload. If you’re a business leader, you’re used to facing some new issue every month or so. Except nowadays, you’re getting a new crisis every three days. Politically driven policy chaos, market disruptions, regulatory changes, technological shifts, and supply chain breakdowns—the pace and scale of overwhelm have risen drastically, creating a perpetual state of anxiety.
To be sure, spotting trends is important. But it’s only the first step in moving from anxiety to action.
Anxiety: Track the Trends
Most large companies are pretty good at identifying and forecasting trends. They employ sophisticated monitoring systems, subscribe to syndicated research, and track technological, economic, and social shifts. But if you’re buying the same reports as everyone else, you’ll have the same view as everyone else. The real work is investing in original research and developing your own point of view on how the world is changing. But that’s table stakes.
Terror: Envision the Change
Fewer companies get beyond trend forecasting to actual scenario planning. That’s where you play these trends out to what the world might look like in five or ten years. In 2010, Intel should have been imagining a world where GPUs revolutionized computation and AI progress accelerated. Scenario planning should make you uncomfortable. That’s the point. If your low-grade anxiety doesn’t turn into real terror about what could upend you, you aren’t doing it right.
Action: Game the War
A very small number of companies move beyond scenarios to actual wargaming. This is where leadership teams role-play direct competitors and rivals. Competitors fight the same game; rivals change the game entirely. It’s not just about imagining how you’ll respond—it’s about stepping into the shoes of the players who might destroy you. Done well, wargaming can turn your terror into a playbook for action. It can open your eyes to “no-regrets moves“: strategies that will strengthen your position regardless of which future materializes. Intel’s leadership team should have regularly held wargame sessions where one group represented Nvidia, another played ARM, another acted as a Chinese startup, and another embodied an entirely new computational paradigm.
Don’t Watch It Happen
Tommy Lasorda once said there are three kinds of people: those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happened. Intel’s decline is a story of watching. For two decades, its leaders spotted every trend, wrote every report, nodded sagely at every forecast—and remained spectators to their own disruption.
It’s entirely understandable to be feeling some anxiety right now. We live in anxious times. But don’t stay that way. In times like these, the companies that win are those that turn anxiety into terror, and terror into action. When you see the future coming at you, don’t just track it or talk about it. Step into the arena, feel the fear, and start swinging. The future won’t wait—and neither should you.
