Hardware

Sounds pretty anti competitive. Wish we still did something about that.

I'd guess that it's more that they're refocusing on AI as a target of their parallel compute people. You need the same parallel compute engineers for both, and there's more money in AI than in gaming.

https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/2025/as-intel-creates-new-ai-group-data-center-division-to-refocus-on-cpus-memos

In memos to Intel employees that were seen by CRN, company leaders indicate that what has been known as the Data Center and AI Group is being split up, with the newly renamed Data Center Group refocusing on CPUs and Sachin Katti taking over responsibilities for data center accelerator chips, like GPUs, in his freshly configured AI and CTO organization.

Katti Says His Group Is At ‘Center’ Of Intel’s Future

In his memo to employees, Katti said he will “lead the strategy, definition and execution for our data center accelerator portfolio as well as product positioning and customer engagements” in his new role as chief technology and AI officer.

The executive, who has been at Intel for more than three years, said his group has absorbed Saurabh Kulkarni, vice president of AI systems design, and the AI systems and GPU product management team. This team was previously a part of the Data Center and AI Group, as Eibschitz noted in her memo.

Katti said the CTO and AI organization will also take in Anil Rao and the systems architecture and engineering team as well as what is called the Intel Cloud Services team. The latter team was most recently led by Markus Flierl, who launched the Intel Tiber AI Cloud service last year and “has decided to leave Intel to pursue external opportunities,” according to Katti. Katti said he plans to name Flierl’s successor.

Same thing is happening at Nvidia.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/18/nvidia-ai-backlash-gamers-geforce-gpu.html

For its first 30 years, Nvidia wasn’t a household name unless you were a gamer. Now, some of its original fan base feel left behind as artificial intelligence has made the chipmaker the world’s most valuable company.

“The gaming segment is no longer the driving force of the company. There was one point when it clearly was,” said Stacy Rasgon of Bernstein Research.

Nvidia popularized the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that enable fast frame rates and rendering that make the best video game play possible.

When Nvidia released its first GPU in 1999, the GeForce 256, it laid off the majority of workers and approached bankruptcy to make it happen. Gamers snapped up the new type of processor, bringing Nvidia back from the brink.

Now, with demand for AI soaring, nearly all of Nvidia’s revenue comes from its products that serve that industry, instead of gaming. And as AI chipmaking shrinks the available memory supply, Nvidia has been forced to make tough decisions about priorities.

I mean, there's obviously still demand for gaming hardware, and I don't think that it's going to go away, but you can't just instantly magic more chip engineers into existence, so to some extent, they gotta pull people off gaming hardware if they want to do AI hardware quickly.

EDIT: Honestly, this might not be a terrible time to own existing gaming hardware, since my guess is that, even aside from the memory shortages holding back newer hardware, we're going to see a slowdown in development of newer stuff, so I'd expect that existing stuff will probably become obsolete more-slowly.