Intel on Thursday said it had appointed Justin Hotard, an HPE executive who specialized on artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), as executive vice president and general manager of its Data Center and AI Group. The main task of the new exec will be to improve Intel's positions on the market of AI hardware.
Hotard succeeds Sandra Rivera, who, as of January 1, assumed the role of chief executive officer at the Programmable Solutions Group, which Intel has spun off into an independent business as it prepares it for an IPO.
Justin Hotard joins Intel at a moment when the company faces significant challenges from numerous rivals. AMD's arch-rival Intel is stronger than ever with its EPYC processors for datacenters, there are some new players with Arm-based server-grade offerings for cloud datacenters, and some of Intel's traditional customers are rolling out their own CPUs for datacenters. The rise of AI has made Nvidia a major player in the datacenter realm (which earns more than Intel and AMD combined) and enabled many new players to enter the scene.
