If the artificial intelligence revolution has ushered in a boomtime for chipmakers, no one seems to have told Intel. 

Late Sunday night, the stumbling semiconductor giant’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, announced his resignation, effective immediately, after a mostly terrible nearly four-year run at the helm of the company. By Monday morning, Bloomberg reported that Intel’s board had forced Gelsinger out after losing confidence in his plans and ability to turn around the once-storied titan of Silicon Valley.

Big Plans

When Gelsinger took the CEO job back in 2021, he was something of a prodigal son. He started out working for Intel as a teenager in 1979 before leaving in 2009, only to return as a wise sage with a vision of turning Intel, then mostly focused on personal computing, into a contract chipmaking foundry. Things didn’t go exactly as planned. Instead, Gelsinger’s tenure has been marked by inflated expectations, major delays, technical problems, and massive sunk costs. Worse: according to a Reuters report this fall, Gelsinger torched Intel’s crucial and cozy relationship with TSMC, the foundry it actually relied on to make many of its chips and which long offered the American company massive discounts — until it didn’t.

Last year, Intel generated just $54 billion in revenue, down roughly 33% since 2021. This year, it’s on track for its first annual net loss since 1986 as it struggles to attract customers to its nascent foundry business; in August, Intel announced layoffs of some 15,000 employees. And all this pain has come with Intel being one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Biden administration’s massive push to upgrade the US’s domestic chip-making industry: 

• Just last week, Intel locked in nearly $7.9 billion in federal grants to build chip-making facilities in four states — though its final haul is lower than previously expected. Still, Gelsinger had promised to invest roughly $60 billion overall into Intel’s factory expansion.
• Meanwhile, Intel has largely failed to demonstrate to high-profile clients that its Gaudi chip, an AI accelerator, could serve as an alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs, and The New York Times recently reported that clients have been informed that Intel’s foundry unit remains far behind the production capabilities of TSMC’s.

In other words: Gelsinger may have had vision, but he didn’t have follow-through. Intel’s stock is down around 50% year-to-date, and over 60% since he took the job.

Export Opinion: A comeback won’t be easy, even under new management, though Intel (and other US chip makers) got a big assist on Monday when the US government imposed a new wave of restrictions on exporting chipmaking equipment to China, which one expert analyst told the Financial Times has been the missing piece in the Biden administration’s export control policies.

How quickly tides can shift.

Late on Sunday Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said that the country was postponing its controversial plans to issue deep-sea mining licenses next year. The move comes as a result of domestic political pressure from a left-wing party within the Norwegian parliament, and marks a major change in tone for Norway, which has been one of the most vociferous proponents of deep-sea mining internationally.

Sea Change

Deep-sea mining has been a divisive topic for the international community. On one side, countries including Norway, the US, and China have all been keen to issue licenses and start mining the seabed for potato-sized metallic nodules. These nodules contain key battery-making minerals such as cobalt and nickel so their economic value is clear. What’s less clear is whether mining them might damage the marine environment, which is why countries such as Germany and France have lobbied to enforce a moratorium on deep-sea mining before it becomes a proper, established industry. Scientists say — and Norway agrees — that the environmental impact cannot be predicted with any confidence. 

Norway voted to approve deep-sea mining in 280,000 square kilometers of Arctic waters that sit inside its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in January, but it’s not the only area where deep-sea politics are starting to shift:

• Although the US has been bullish on deep-sea mining, there has also been domestic political opposition. In July, Hawaii Governor Josh Green signed a bill banning seabed mining in the island’s waters.
• In August, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body which regulates deep-sea mining outside of countries’ EEZs (i.e., in international waters) elected a new general secretary, oceanographer Leticia Carvalho. The election was contentious, with Carvalho edging out incumbent Michael Lodge, who’d campaigned to get regulations in place to allow the pursuit of deep-sea mining. 

New Sheriff in Town: Mining companies are pursuing aggressive timelines and Canadian mining concern The Metals Company has said it plans to apply for a license this year even if regulations aren’t in place yet. In interviews, Carvalho has signaled she won’t be giving carte blanche to the gold rush. “I would be very much concerned to have a mining exploitation request sat on my table without a mining code,” she told CNBC in August. Top on her list is to “rebuild trust” in the ISA and increase transparency.

Stoli Group USA, the maker of the eponymous vodka, had bankruptcy protection to be thankful for during last week’s holiday, filing for Chapter 11 with liabilities between $50 million and $100 million.

But it’s not the only spiritmaker with cause to worry that the market is about to prove harder than its products.

Shaken and On the Rocks

Stoli, a unit of Luxembourg-based SPI Group, has its own unique problems. It was long marketed as a Russian vodka, but has been made in Latvia for several decades. That’s in part because its billionaire founder, Yuri Shefler, is a Russian exile who has feuded with the country’s President Vladimir Putin, condemning the latter’s invasion of Ukraine and anti-LGBT laws. Russian authorities have cracked down on the company at home, branding it an “extremist” organization, demanding it hand over its profits to a state entity, and moving to seize its assets.

Enough to drive one to drink, in other words. But Stoli’s not alone in spiritmakers worrying about geopolitics:

• President-elect Donald Trump has promised blanket tariffs, but he’s also gone after spirits specifically in past trade spats. For example, he hit the Scotch whisky industry with tariffs as part of a trade spat from 2019 to 2021, costing the sector £600 million ($760 million), according to the Scotch Whisky Association. If an agreement isn’t struck by June 2026, they could be brought back.
• Blanket tariffs would also go down like contaminated moonshine: Pernod does one third of its trade with America and Diageo does 40%. Campari, Moet Hennessy, and Remy Cointreau also count the US as their biggest market.

Hops would get deflated, too: Wells Fargo said last week that the cost of Modelo, a popular beer brand imported from Mexico, could jump 4.5%, while importer Constellation Brands would get smacked with a 16% cost increase.

America First? UBS’s analysts also estimated that 79% of spirits sold in America are imported, so could that actually be a leg up for domestic producers? Maybe. They just have one problem to contend with: Americans. For the first time in almost three decades, the International Wine and Spirits Record last year noted a decline — in this case of 2% — in the volume of spirits sold in America. This year has been even worse, with a 3% decline in the first seven months.