Ex-Intel Chief Bets on Light-Based Chip Technology to Revive Moore's Law

Pat Gelsinger stepped down from Intel's helm late in 2024 and spent the next several months exploring his next chapter. After considering roles in government, academia, and finance, he settled on an unexpected destination: venture capital focused on cutting-edge technologies. In March, he joined Playground Capital as a general partner, bringing decades of semiconductor expertise to a fund betting on ambitious scientific breakthroughs.

His central mission is unambiguous—to help shepherd semiconductor startups toward reigniting Moore's law, the once-predictable doubling of transistor density roughly every two years that powered computing's relentless advance. That trajectory has stalled as industry players hit physical and economic barriers to miniaturization at atomic scales.

The Lithography Bet#

Gelsinger sees the solution lying not in incremental chip design improvements but in radically better ways to etch transistors into silicon. He points to advanced lithography—using extremely fine beams of light to pattern semiconductors—as the breakthrough that matters most.

Today's leading systems, built by Dutch firm ASML, work with 13.5-nanometer wavelength light. The next leap would harness shorter wavelengths, potentially reaching 5-, 4-, 3-, or even 2-nanometer bands, allowing manufacturers to pack vastly more features onto a single die. One of Playground's portfolio companies, xLight, is pursuing novel lithography techniques and has also secured backing from the US government.

"Light is the most important thing," Gelsinger told WIRED. He describes lithography as the central pillar of semiconductor progress—without advances there, other innovations in materials science and chip architecture cannot fully pay off.

Why Deep Tech Is Suddenly Hot#

Gelsinger's move reflects a broader pivot in venture capital. As artificial intelligence has begun to saturate the software sector, investors are hunting for the next wave of outsized returns in harder, more fundamental technologies. The business case has shifted dramatically. AI's explosive demand for chip computing has compressed timelines; the semiconductor sector now looks poised to hit the $1 trillion revenue mark far sooner than previously forecast—next year rather than 2030.

That scale of opportunity means smaller wins can still yield exceptional returns. Gelsinger observes that most venture firms jumping into deep tech lack the engineering rigor to distinguish genuinely viable startups from dead ends. His process emphasizes technical depth: his team includes PhDs and professors who conduct rigorous due diligence on the underlying physics, interrogate founders on the hardest problems they face, and identify the strongest teams, not merely adequate ones.