Intel Hires Qualcomm Executive To Lead GPU Engineering For Data Centers

Eric Demers, who recently led Qualcomm’s GPU efforts as senior vice president of engineering, tells CRN he will lead GPU engineering with a focus on AI at Intel.

Intel has hired an executive who led Qualcomm’s GPU engineering efforts to aid with the semiconductor giant’s latest attempt at building AI chips for data centers.

Eric Demers, who recently led Qualcomm’s GPU efforts as senior vice president of engineering, told CRN in a LinkedIn private message that he is starting next week at Intel to lead GPU engineering with a focus on AI as a senior vice president.

Demers announced his plan to join Intel on LinkedIn earlier in the day.

An Intel spokesperson declined to comment.

Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, told CRN Friday that he was surprised by Demers leaving Qualcomm for Intel, mainly because the executive had been at the former company for nearly 14 years.

The analyst said the personnel move is “bigger than people realize.”

“I think people a lot of times focus on executives. And he is an executive, but also he is a GPU architect, of which there are not that many that are at the level that he is at because he can basically build a GPU architecture from the ground up,” he said.

Qualcomm did not respond to a request for comment.

As the leader of Qualcomm’s GPU efforts, Demers (pictured above) was responsible for the company’s Adreno GPU hardware and architecture, which spanned mobile devices, PCs, IoT devices, automotive systems as well as augmented reality and virtual reality devices.

Before Demers left Qualcomm, he had spent time in the previous months promoting his team’s work on the latest Adreno GPU implementation for the company’s upcoming Snapdragon X2 Series chips for Windows PCs.

Sag said it made sense that Demers would take on a GPU engineering leadership role for the data center segment because the executive’s team had been focused on AI in recent years.

“If you look at Qualcomm's GPU architecture today, a lot of that is also focused on AI, and there's already things that they’re doing to make AI more efficient and more performant on the architecture,” the analyst said.

Prior to joining Qualcomm in 2012, Demers was CTO for AMD’s graphics division. He joined AMD through its 2006 acquisition of graphics chip designer ATI, where he started in 2000 after a slew of jobs at smaller chip firms, including Silicon Graphics.

Demers Hire Is Part Of Intel’s Latest AI Push

Intel’s hiring of Demers is part of the company’s latest push to build competitive accelerator chips in a challenge to Nvidia, which has dominated the AI infrastructure market but has seen increased rivalry recently from AMD, Qualcomm and other firms.

The chipmaker has struggled for more than a decade to define and execute a successful accelerated computing strategy, most recently reflected by its failure to meet a modest, $500 million revenue goal for its Gaudi chips in 2024.

Under Lip-Bu Tan, who became Intel’s CEO last March, the leader has made AI, particularly when it comes to the data center market, a top priority, pushing for organizational changes, making new hires and defining a new strategy that calls for the company to provide open systems and software architecture as well as an annual GPU release cadence.

Last fall, the company announced the first GPU as part of this road map, a 160-GB, energy-efficient data center GPU code-named “Crescent Island.” The chipmaker has also teased the development of the “Jaguar Shores” accelerator chip for rack-scale solutions.

However, Tan faced a setback when Sachin Katti, the executive he appointed to lead Intel’s newly independent AI Group, left the company for a job at OpenAI last November.

At the time, Tan said that he would assume leadership of the AI Group and Intel Advanced Technologies Group that were previously led by Katti, explaining that his decision was motivated by recent changes felt by the teams.

Referring to AI as “one of Intel’s most important priorities and most exciting areas of opportunity,” Tan said in a memo last October these opportunities exist “not only in traditional general-purpose computing”—referring to CPUs—“but also in the emerging realms of inference workloads driven by agentic AI and physical AI.”

“To capture these opportunities, we must move decisively, leveraging our scale and ecosystem to establish Intel as the compute platform of choice for the next generation of AI-driven workloads,” Tan wrote in the memo.