Gelsinger said he intends to keep the company together and has the support of the board for his plan. He has a “lot of energy and passion” to bring to that effort, he said.

“Obviously there’s a lot of attention on Intel which just reinforces what a central role it plays in the technology industry,” he said in the interview. “We believe distinct, but better together, is the strategy.”

The company is in negotiations with potential investors for its Altera programable chip unit. It expects to conclude that process early next year, Gelsinger said on a call with investors. Meanwhile, he’s reviewing options for similar actions for other parts of Intel’s business.

Intel’s leader was one of the chief lobbyists for the Chips and Science Act, a Biden administration industrial policy aimed at bringing back chip manufacturing to the US with tens of billions of dollars in public money support.

Gelsinger, in an interview with Bloomberg Television, said that Intel hasn’t yet received any of the funds to help with construction of new facilities in Arizona and Ohio, and criticized the speed at which support has been made available.

Still, he remains confident that, regardless of who wins the US presidential election, the initiative will continue. “The Chips Act was a bipartisan act with strong support from both sides of the aisle,” he said.

The company is also under siege in its traditional stronghold of selling processors for servers and personal computers. For decades, its superior manufacturing made its chips the market leader and locked down an improbably high market share. Since losing its lead in process technology to rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., others such as Nvidia and AMD have been able to field competitive chips made by the provider of outsourced production.

Gelsinger’s expensive plans to take back leadership in that crucial area involve a new factory network that he plans to fill with orders from other chipmakers, in addition to Intel’s own designs. In the interim, Intel is facing depressed revenue and elevated costs. That’s destroyed profit margins that were once the envy of the industry.

Gross margin, or the percentage of sales remaining after deducting the cost of production, was 15% in the quarter. At its peak, Intel regularly reported gross margin of well above 60%.

In the third quarter, the company had a loss of 46 cents a share, excluding certain items, and revenue of $13.3 billion, down 6%. That quarterly sales total is its lowest for the third quarter in more than a decade but came in ahead of company projections, Gelsinger said.

Analysts had estimated a loss of 3 cents a share and sales of $13 billion. Wall Street is projecting a modest increase in overall sales this year from 2024, still leaving the company more than $20 billion below its peak in 2021.

Gelsinger remains confident that Intel is on the right track in the long run. He said Intel has paid the heavy price of catching up to the industry, and now can focus on its finances.

The chipmaker is reporting earnings for the third time under a new business structure that shows the financial performance of its manufacturing operations. Gelsinger has said the restructuring was a necessary step to make operations more efficient and competitive.

Its so-called foundry unit had sales that slipped 8% from the prior-year quarter to $4.4 billion, in line with estimates. PC chip sales were $7.3 billion, versus an estimate of $7.46 billion. It’s data center and AI chip unit gained 9% for sales of $3.3 billion, compared with an average estimate of $3.1 billion.

For the next two years, the majority of work done by Intel’s factories will come from orders from its own chip design unit. The financial benefit of outside business will start to show up in 2026, Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger emphasized on the call with investors that Intel is “far from satisfied” with where it is.

–With assistance from Ed Ludlow.

(Updates with Gelsinger comments on the Chips Act)

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