Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger wants to revive Moore's Law with light

After departing Intel as CEO in late 2024, Pat Gelsinger held 100 meetings in 100 days before joining Playground Capital as general partner in March 2025. His goal is to help semiconductor startups reawaken Moore's Law, which has stalled due to physical limits of transistor shrinkage. Gelsinger sees lithography—etching chips with nanometer-scale light—as the breakthrough needed. He took a board seat at xLight, a Playground portfolio company developing novel lithography techniques with free-electron lasers to go below the current 13.5-nanometer standard from ASML. Gelsinger believes AI accelerates the semiconductor industry, pushing its trillion-dollar target to 2026. He also stresses energy capacity as a bottleneck, investing in nuclear upgrades via Alva Energy.