Pat Gelsinger joins Playground Capital to back new chip making tools

In short: Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has joined venture capital firm Playground Capital, aiming to fund chip startups that use new “light printing” methods to keep chips improving.

What happened

Pat Gelsinger left Intel as CEO in late 2024. He told WIRED he then held “100 meetings in 100 days” to narrow down his next job options.

In March, Gelsinger announced he had become a general partner at Playground Capital. Playground is a venture capital firm, which means it invests money in young companies in hopes they grow.

Gelsinger says he wants to help semiconductor startups push forward Moore’s law. Moore’s law is an old rule of thumb that chips tend to get much more powerful every couple of years because engineers fit more tiny parts, called transistors, onto each chip.

Gelsinger argues the biggest bottleneck is lithography, which is how chips are “printed” using extremely precise light (like using a very advanced stencil to draw tiny patterns). Today’s leading systems, made by Dutch company ASML, use 13.5-nanometer wavelength light.

At Playground, Gelsinger took a board seat at xLight, a company working on new lithography approaches. xLight has also received US government support, according to a recent Department of Commerce announcement.

Why it matters

Better chip making tools can lead to faster and more energy-efficient computers, which affects everyday things like phones, cars, and the cost of running AI. If it becomes easier to make smaller chip features, AI systems may be able to do more work using less electricity, which is a growing concern as data centers expand.

Source: Wired