Meet New Intel Products CEO Michelle Holthaus: 5 Big Things To Know

With Michelle Johnston Holthaus becoming interim co-CEO of Intel and CEO of the Intel Products group, CRN provides an overview of the most important things you should know about her, including why Intel’s board chose her for the job and what her previous roles were.

When Intel announced the abrupt retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger on Monday, it marked the rise of a longtime company executive with deep channel and sales roots to the very top.

In addition to naming 28-year Intel veteran Michelle Johnston Holthaus interim co-CEO alongside CFO David Zinsner, the semiconductor giant also granted her the new, permanent title of CEO of Intel Products, giving her control over its core chip design businesses.

Intel Products includes the company’s PC chip business, the Client Computing Group, which Holthaus led for nearly three years after serving as chief sales officer and general manager of Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group.

The Data Center and AI Group and the Network and Edge Group are also part of Intel Products, whose financials and operations were separated from the company’s manufacturing business, Intel Foundry, at the beginning of this year.

In a joint statement with Zinsner, Holthaus said the two top executives are “grateful for Pat’s commitment to Intel” and added that they will “redouble our commitment to Intel Products and meeting customer needs.”

“With our product and process leadership progressing, we will be focused on driving returns on foundry investments,” they concluded in their prepared statement.

While some of Intel’s channel partners said the sudden departure of Gelsinger left them feeling uncertain about the company’s future, they were encouraged to see Holthaus, who formerly held a variety of sales and channel leadership titles, take a larger role.

“Michelle's a great leader, and I think she'll be a good steward of the business,” said Erik Stromquist, chairman of Beaverton, Ore.-based Chrome device manufacturer CTL, in an interview with CRN on Monday.

What follows are five things to know about Holthaus, including how Intel Products became a distinct group, why Intel’s board chose Holthaus to lead Intel Products, what her responsibilities were in the Client Computing Group and how she prioritized channel partners as the general manager of Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group.

How Intel Products Became Its Own Group

Up until this year, Intel Products was not a distinct group, but that changed when the chipmaker realized it needed to separate its chip design businesses from its chip manufacturing operation for a better chance to compete with contract chipmakers like TSMC.

When the company marked the official launch of Intel Foundry as a contract chip manufacturer in February, Intel said it was separating the chip design businesses from its manufacturing operations for multiple reasons, including to build trust with external chip design customers.

The separation means that Intel Foundry now treats the Intel Products group as a customer alongside these external chip designers, which are expected to include Microsoft and Amazon Web Services in the future. In turn, they will have to compete for business with Intel Foundry as part of the internal foundry model Intel adopted at the beginning of the year.

“It helps our customers feel the trust because we’re now independent, we can make decisions about capacity allocations, technology, preferences and so on independently based on what’s best for that [business with a profit and loss statement],” Intel Foundry executive Craig Orr said at the company’s foundry event launch in February.

In early April, Intel revealed a new financial reporting structure where it treat revenues and expenses for Intel Products—which consists of the Client Computing Group, Data Center and AI Group and Network and Edge Group—as separate from those for Intel Foundry.

Intel Products does not include Altera, the business unit formerly known as the Programmable Solutions Group that is now an independent subsidiary; Mobileye, the automotive tech business that went public last year but is majority-owned by Intel; and unspecified startup businesses.

Why The Board Chose Holthaus To Lead Intel Products

At the UBS Global Technology Conference on Wednesday, Zinsner (pictured) said Intel’s board of directors chose Holthaus to lead the Intel Products group to push for better performance and execution across all of its chip design teams.

“One thing that we have noticed is there are things that transcend all the business units on the product side that probably were getting sub-optimized, and I think having a leader over all of it allows us to be a little bit more functional about how we drive products, have excellence across all those functions, perform better, execute better and be cohesive across the business units in terms of how they go to market,” he said.

Zinsner praised Holthaus as someone who is “very capable” for the role.

“She knows all the customers really well. They all love her. She's been in that business unit or sales roles for decades, so she understands the business quite well. She was the perfect person, not only to take on the product CEO job, but also to slot in this co-CEO role,” he said.

As the other interim co-CEO, Zinsner said he can address areas of leadership, particularly when it comes to finance, investors and “some of the more operational activities.”

Holthaus Led Client Computing Group Amid Rising Competition

Intel announced Holthaus as executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group (CCG) on Jan. 10, 2022, the same day that it named Zinsner, formerly of Micron Technology, as its new CFO.

Holthaus took over CCG from Gregory Bryant, a 30-year company veteran who left Intel to become the CEO of Analog Devices.

As head of CCG, Holthaus was responsible for all aspects of the business, including strategy, financial performance and product development for the division’s entire portfolio of products and platforms.

CCG’s portfolio includes Intel’s Core CPUs for desktop PCs and laptops as well as components and technologies for Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Thunderbolt.

It also includes the vPro platform, which enables enterprise-grade management and security features in Intel processors, and Intel Evo, a program launched in 2020 that provides engineering and marketing resources to OEMs for premium laptops that meet a minimum of key experience indicators and specifications defined by Intel.

CCG has been Intel’s largest business for decades. In the company’s third quarter, CCG revenue was $7.3 billion, which was 55 percent of total revenue.

While CCG’s revenue declined under Holthaus’ leadership in by 7.6 percent to $29.3 billion last year, sales made a comeback in 2024 by growing 31 percent and 9 percent year over year in the first and second quarters, respectively, before declining 7 percent in the third.

Since she took over, CCG has been dealing with cooling demand in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in addition to persistent CPU competition from AMD and Apple, the latter of which fully switched to its own custom chip designs for Macs in 2023.

Earlier this year, Qualcomm launched a revitalized push in the PC market with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors, which were selected as the exclusive launch chips for Microsoft’s new line of Copilot+ PCs.

Intel’s x86 CPU market share in the PC segment fell to a record low in the third quarter, declining 2.9 points sequentially and 4.6 points year over year to 76.1 percent against AMD’s 23.9 percent, according to Mercury Research.

Holthaus has been at the forefront of Intel’s AI PC strategy, which has included software enablement and co-marketing with more than 100 ISVs who are building AI features that can take advantage of the company’s Core Ultra processors.

The executive also oversaw the transfer of Intel’s Next Unit of Compute (NUC) miniature PC business to Taiwanese electronics giant ASUS in 2023.

Holthaus Championed ‘One Intel’ Approach For Channel Partners

Before Holthaus became head of Intel’s Client Computing Group, she was executive vice president, chief sales officer and general manager of the Sales and Marketing Group (SMG).

SMG houses Intel’s global partner organization, the channel’s main conduit for working with the semiconductor giant.

While she was the head of SMG, Holthaus vowed at a 2020 partner event to use a “one Intel” approach to boost the businesses of its channel partners and help them more closely align with the company’s marketing plans.

“We‘re going to focus a lot on aligning our road map with our marketing plans with the goal of increasing the value and making that one-punch market impact,” she said in 2020. “So when you see the new brand or you see us talking about that, you have a product that goes along with it that you can immediately go out and talk to your customers about.”

Before she took over as the head of SMG, Holthaus held a variety of sales and channel leadership roles, including general manager of sales and marketing for the Client Components Group as well as general manager of channel for Central Marketing and Operations, where she led channel efforts for Intel's Client Computing Group.

She also led “all aspects of Intel’s global Microsoft account, managing the executive relationship between the two companies” from 2013 to 2017, per her LinkedIn profile.

Other previous roles included general manager of the Channel Mobile Product Group, general manager of the Channel Desktop Products Group and director of marketing for the Reseller Product Group, according to Holthaus’ LinkedIn profile.

Holthaus got her start at Intel as a program manager in the OEM Platform Solutions Division, according to her official biography on Intel’s website.

She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in finance from Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon, located roughly 40 miles southwest of Portland.

Holthaus Made Channel Partners Higher Priority As Sales Head

When she was head of Intel’s Sales and Marketing Group, Holthaus said she made the chipmaker’s relationship with channel partners a higher priority when she appointed John Kalvin as global channel chief at the end of 2020.

Holthaus, who reported directly to Gelsinger at the time, said she did this by having Kalvin report directly to her when she named him vice president and general manager of global scale and partners, a change in the reporting structure that was in place for previous global channel chiefs, Holthaus told CRN in an interview in 2021.

This meant that with Kalvin in charge of channel partner relationships, partners would have more equal footing with Intel’s largest customers, Holthaus said.

Intel’s previous global channel chief, Greg Baur, reported to Shannon Poulin, who in turn reported to Holthaus as corporate vice president and general manager of global markets and partners in previous years.

“One of the reasons I put John Kalvin on my staff was, I have a lot of large customers obviously and they have a voice at the table every day, but I really felt like our channel partners needed a voice at the table every single day,” she told CRN.

Prior to the change, Holthaus said, supply chain issues and challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic led her to want a better pulse on the thoughts and needs of channel partners.

“I just found that I was constantly asking, like, ‘Hey, what does the channel need? What do these partners need? What do our cloud partners need?’ And I felt like we just needed somebody who could sit on staff who could constantly remind us,” she said.

As head of the Sales and Marketing Group, Holthaus said she held direct conversations with channel partner executives on Intel’s Channel Board of Advisors every quarter.

“This is a very important group. We learned so much from our channel partners and our Board of Advisors, and they inspire us to do things that we may not have thought about,” she said.

When Gelsinger was appointed CEO of Intel, Holthaus said she implored Gelsinger to keep a close connection with the company’s channel partners.

“I said to Pat, ‘My challenge for you is, you need to be at every major channel event and partner event that we have. You need to be meeting with them on a quarterly basis, and you just need to be engaged,’” Holthaus said, recalling a conversation with Gelsinger.