News from 21 March 2023. Intel announced two senior leadership changes on 21 March 2023: Stuart Pann was named senior vice president and general manager of Intel Foundry Services (IFS), replacing Dr. Randhir Thakur, and Raja Koduri, the executive who had led Intel's GPU push, said he was leaving the company at the end of March to start a software company focused on generative AI. CEO Pat Gelsinger announced both changes publicly.
Key points
- Stuart Pann became SVP and GM of Intel Foundry Services, reporting to Pat Gelsinger.
- Randhir Thakur, the first head of IFS, had said in November 2022 that he would step down; he left at the end of March 2023.
- Raja Koduri, executive vice president and chief architect, left Intel at the end of March 2023 for a generative AI startup aimed at gaming, media and entertainment.
- The graphics group Koduri had built had already been split up in December 2022.
The foundry change
Intel announced leadership changes affecting its Intel Foundry Services and graphics and accelerator businesses. Stuart Pann was promoted to be the new senior VP and general manager of Intel Foundry Services, replacing Dr. Randhir Thakur. Pann has a background in business management and corporate planning, and is credited with being one of the chief organisers behind Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy, the 2021 plan under which Intel would keep making its own chips, use outside foundries where it made sense, and open its fabs to external customers through IFS.
Pann had spent most of his career at Intel, left for a period to serve as chief supply chain and information officer at HP, and returned in 2021 to run corporate planning. Gelsinger pointed to his experience with capital and capacity planning, which matters for a foundry business whose success depends on building fabs ahead of customer demand.
The GPU change
Meanwhile, Raja Koduri, the chief architect behind Intel's GPU business, left the company. Koduri joined Intel in late 2017 from AMD, where he had led the Radeon graphics group, and before that he had worked on graphics architecture at Apple. At Intel he led the Xe graphics architecture, the Arc consumer GPUs, the Ponte Vecchio data centre GPU and the oneAPI software effort.
The departure followed a reorganisation in December 2022, when Intel split its Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics group (AXG): consumer graphics moved into the Client Computing Group and data centre GPUs into the Data Center and AI group, and Koduri returned to the role of chief architect.
Why it mattered
- Foundry: IFS was central to Gelsinger's turnaround plan, and a leader with a capacity and capital planning background signalled a focus on execution and customer commitments.
- Graphics and AI: losing the architect of its GPU line came just as demand for AI accelerators was rising sharply, raising questions about Intel's data centre GPU roadmap.
What happened next
For context, later events (not part of the original March 2023 news): Intel renamed its foundry business Intel Foundry in February 2024, Pat Gelsinger retired as CEO in December 2024, and Lip-Bu Tan became CEO in March 2025. For more on Intel's products at the time, see Top 10 things to know about Intel data centre products (March 2023).
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