英特尔漫长而痛苦的衰落：巨头终难逃没落？
The Long, Painful Downfall of Intel

Engineers once strode across Intel’s Silicon Valley headquarters with pride. The semiconductor company they worked for had helped birth the region’s tech industry, sparked the personal computer revolution and turned the tiny transistor into the brains of everything from toasters to fighter jets.
曾几何时，英特尔硅谷总部的工程师们迈着自豪的步伐在公司的硅谷总部穿行。他们效力的这家半导体公司不仅助力催生了硅谷的科技产业、引爆了个人电脑革命，还将微小的晶体管打造成从烤面包机到战斗机等各类设备的大脑。

Intel did so partly by following the business philosophy of its third employee, Andy Grove, who held top leadership positions from 1979 to 2005 and was chief executive from 1987 to 1998. He built the company into the dominant supplier of chips used in most computers, fostering a culture of constructive confrontation rooted in his personal motto: Only the paranoid survive.
英特尔能取得这番成就，部分要归功于公司第三位员工安迪·格鲁夫的经营理念。格鲁夫在1979年至2005年间一直担任公司高层管理职务，其中1987年至1998年任首席执行官。他将英特尔打造成了大多数电脑使用的芯片的主导供应商，并培育出一种“建设性对抗”的企业文化，其核心正是他的个人座右铭：“只有偏执狂才能生存”。

But after Mr. Grove’s departure, Intel lost its edge. The company missed the smartphone and artificial intelligence revolutions. Its chip manufacturing prowess faltered. And on Friday, it became the recipient of one of the largest U.S. government investments in a company since the 2008 financial crisis, when President Trump announced a deal for a 10 percent stake in the business, worth about $8.9 billion.
但格鲁夫离任后，英特尔逐渐失去了竞争优势。公司错失了智能手机和人工智能革命的机遇，芯片制造实力也日渐衰退。上周五，英特尔成为自2008年金融危机以来美国政府对企业最大规模投资的受益者，特朗普总统宣布了一项交易，以约89亿美元的价格收购该公司10%的股份。

Intel’s journey from icon to government project makes it the latest to experience one of the tech industry’s oldest truths: Even the mightiest companies can fall from grace. Visionary founders, armed with original and disruptive ideas, often lift start-ups to prominence, creating businesses that can change the world. But when they leave, many of those companies miss the next wave, fall behind upstarts and slowly fade.
从行业标杆变为需政府扶持的企业，英特尔的历程印证了科技行业一条古老的真理：即使是最强大的企业，也可能从巅峰跌落。富有远见的创始人往往能凭借独创且颠覆性的理念将初创企业推向巅峰，打造出足以改变世界的企业。但当创始人离去后，许多这类公司会错失下一波技术浪潮，被新兴企业超越，最终慢慢走向衰落。

The tech titans of today work on the graveyards of yesterday. Apple’s headquarters sit atop what was once an enormous Hewlett-Packard site; Google works on a plot of land that Silicon Graphics once called home; and Meta took over the campus of Sun Microsystems, where it has left its predecessor’s sign as a visible reminder of the risks of complacency.
如今的科技巨头矗立在昔日行业巨头的废墟之上：苹果总部建在惠普曾经的大型园区旧址；谷歌的办公用地曾是硅图公司的总部；Meta则接管了太阳微系统公司的园区，还保留了前任公司的标识，以此作为自满带来风险的醒目警示。

Intel was born in 1968 when two semiconductor pioneers — Robert Noyce, who invented the microchip; and Gordon Moore, who predicted chip performance would increase exponentially — left Fairchild Semiconductor to start a competitor. They brought with them Mr. Grove, a Hungarian-born engineer with a knack for management discipline, and spent a year developing new technologies.
1968年，两位半导体领域的先驱——微芯片发明者罗伯特·诺伊斯，以及提出芯片性能将呈指数级增长的戈登·摩尔——离开仙童半导体公司，创办了英特尔这一竞争对手。他们还带来了出生于匈牙利、擅长管理的工程师格鲁夫，并花了一年时间研发新技术。

The company’s first products were memory chips, slices of silicon that store short-term data. Intel later invented the chips called microprocessors that perform calculations. The U.S. government was among the earliest customers for semiconductors. Mr. Moore championed a future with chips in everything from cameras to toys to manufacturing equipment.
英特尔最初的产品是存储短期数据的硅基存储芯片，后来又发明了用于计算任务的微处理器芯片。美国政府是半导体最早的客户群体之一。摩尔曾预言，未来的芯片将会应用于从相机到玩具再到制造设备的各个领域。

Hobbyists and companies in the 1970s frequently built early personal computers using Intel’s 8080 microprocessor, which outsold rival chips. The company later persuaded IBM to use Intel chips in its personal computers.
20世纪70年代，爱好者和企业常使用英特尔的8080微处理器组装早期个人电脑，这款芯片的销量远超竞争对手。后来，英特尔成功说服IBM在其个人电脑中采用英特尔芯片。

Echoing IBM, Microsoft in 1985 built its Windows software to run on Intel processors. The combination created the “Wintel era,” when the majority of the world’s computers featured Windows software and Intel hardware. Microsoft’s and Intel’s profits soared, turning them into two of the world’s most valuable companies by the mid-1990s. Most of the world’s computers soon featured “Intel Inside” stickers, making the chipmaker a household name.
效仿IBM的做法，微软于1985年开发了可在英特尔处理器上运行的Windows系统。这一组合开启了“Wintel时代”——当时全球大多数电脑都采用Windows系统搭配英特尔硬件的配置。微软和英特尔的利润大幅飙升，到20世纪90年代中期双双跻身全球市值最高的企业行列。不久后，世界上大多数电脑都贴上了英特尔处理器的标识，这家芯片制造商也因此成为家喻户晓的名字。

In 2009, the Obama administration was so troubled by Intel’s dominance in computer chips that it filed a broad antitrust case against the Silicon Valley giant. It was settled the next year with concessions that hardly dented the company’s profits.
2009年，奥巴马政府对英特尔在电脑芯片领域的垄断地位深感担忧，对这家硅谷巨头提起了广泛的反垄断诉讼。次年双方达成和解，英特尔虽做出让步，但其利润几乎未受影响。

By then, cracks were beginning to show. Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive from 2005 to 2013, turned down a request from Apple to make chips for the first iPhone. He thought the price Apple offered was too low. He later expressed regret as the iPhone became a blockbuster.
那时隐患已开始显现。2005年至2013年担任英特尔首席执行官的保罗·欧德宁曾拒绝苹果为其第一代iPhone定制芯片的请求，理由是苹果给出的价格过低。后来，随着iPhone风靡全球，欧德宁对此表达了遗憾。

“The world would have been a lot different if we’d done it,” Mr. Otellini told The Atlantic in a 2013 interview.
“如果我们当时接下了这个订单，世界可能会大不一样。”2013年，欧德宁在接受《大西洋》月刊采访时表示。

Intel weathered the mistake by supplying chips to the data centers that underpinned the booming cloud computing market. Its annual revenue rose to $53 billion in 2013 from $34 billion in 2005.
不过，英特尔通过为支撑蓬勃发展的云计算市场的数据中心供应芯片渡过了这次失误带来的危机。其年收入从2005年的340亿美元增长至2013年的530亿美元。

Company leaders would later say that its lucrative microprocessors — which powered not only PCs but larger machines called servers — were a creosote bush, a plant that poisons competing plants around it. Intel often spun up projects for new products, only to shut them down as leaders lost patience or the technology disappointed.
公司管理层后来表示，当时英特尔利润丰厚的微处理器——不仅驱动个人电脑供电，还为服务器等大型设备提供支持——就像一种名为三齿拉雷亚灌木的植物，会毒害周围其他与其竞争的植物。英特尔虽常启动新产品项目，但往往因管理层失去耐心或技术未达预期而中途叫停。

One project Intel killed was a chip that could do many computations at once, emulating chips known as graphics processing units that are critical to video games and would eventually power artificial intelligence applications. But the graphics chip that Intel developed didn’t work, so it pulled the plug.
英特尔叫停的项目之一是一款可同时进行多项计算的芯片，该芯片旨在模拟图形处理单元，图形处理器对视频游戏至关重要，后来还成为人工智能应用的核心算力支撑。但英特尔研发的这款图形芯片未能成功，最终项目被搁置。

Mr. Otellini’s successor, Brian Krzanich, tried elbowing into the mobile business that Intel missed by pouring billions into creating a modem chip for iPhones. But the company struggled to develop the technology and eventually sold it to Apple, after Mr. Krzanich was forced to leave Intel over a relationship he had with an employee.
欧德宁的继任者布莱恩·科兹安尼克试图弥补英特尔在移动领域的错失，投入数十亿美元为iPhone研发调制解调器芯片。然而，公司在这项技术研发上困难重重；更雪上加霜的是，科兹安尼克因与公司员工存在不当关系被迫离职，最终英特尔将调制解调器业务出售给了苹果。

Intel also fell behind in semiconductor manufacturing as it ran into delays perfecting new production processes. That allowed rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung Electronics to overtake it between 2015 and 2019.
与此同时，英特尔在半导体制造领域也因新生产工艺迟迟不能完善而落后。2015年至2019年间，台积电、三星电子等竞争对手趁机超越了英特尔。

In 2021, Intel asked Pat Gelsinger, a former top executive, to return to lead a turnaround. Mr. Gelsinger hatched an ambitious plan to regain Intel’s manufacturing lead by introducing five new production processes in four years. He also lobbied for the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, which designated $50 billion to revitalize U.S. chip making.
2021年，英特尔邀请前高管帕特·格尔辛格回归，负责公司转型。格尔辛格制定了一项雄心勃勃的计划：四年内推出五项新生产工艺，重夺制造领域的领先地位。他还游说拜登政府通过《芯片与科学法案》，该法案拨款500亿美元用于重振美国芯片制造业。

Mr. Gelsinger committed more than $100 billion to chip manufacturing in the United States across facilities in Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico and Ohio, where it would build a new operation.
格尔辛格承诺投资超1000亿美元，在美国亚利桑那州、俄勒冈州、新墨西哥州和俄亥俄州建设芯片制造设施，其中俄亥俄州将建立一个新的业务实体。

But as Intel focused on manufacturing, the demand for graphics processing units exploded in 2022 and 2023 after an A.I. start-up, OpenAI, used the components to train an artificial intelligence system called ChatGPT, which could write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions. Nvidia, a rival to Intel, specialized in graphics processing units.
但就在英特尔专注于制造业务时，2022年至2023年，人工智能初创公司OpenAI使用图形处理器训练出了能写诗、编代码、解答复杂问题的ChatGPT系统，图形处理器的需求随之激增。而英特尔的竞争对手英伟达正是专精图形处理器领域的企业。

Intel sales sank as cloud computing companies flocked to Nvidia’s chips. At the same time, Intel’s costs from hiring and manufacturing rose.
随着云计算公司纷纷采用英伟达芯片，英特尔的销售额大幅下滑；与此同时，公司在招聘和制造方面的成本却不断上升。

Last November, Intel received $7.86 billion in CHIPS Act funding from the U.S. government. It later fired Mr. Gelsinger and tapped Lip-Bu Tan, a semiconductor executive, to revive it.
去年11月，英特尔获得了美国政府通过《芯片与科学法案》提供的78.6亿美元资金。随后，公司解雇了格尔辛格，任命半导体行业高管陈立武接手，试图挽救局面。

Mr. Tan outlined a plan to cut staff, develop a new A.I. strategy and focus on finding customers for a future iteration of Intel’s chip-making technology. But five months into the job, Mr. Trump called for Mr. Tan’s resignation, citing his investments in Chinese semiconductor companies.
陈立武提出了一系列计划：裁员、制定新的人工智能战略、并专注于为英特尔未来的芯片制造技术寻找客户。然而，上任仅五个月，特朗普就以陈立武在中国半导体公司有投资为由要求他辞职。

The attack sent Mr. Tan to Washington this month to meet with Mr. Trump. The president proposed that Intel give the U.S. government a 10 percent stake in exchange for the CHIPS Act money it had been awarded. The deal was finalized on Friday.
这一施压促使陈立武本月前往华盛顿与特朗普会面。总统提出，英特尔需向美国政府出让10%的股份，以换取此前已获批的《芯片与科学法案》资金。该交易于上周五正式敲定。

In the meantime, Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable public company, worth more than $4.3 trillion. Intel, which once towered over Nvidia, is valued at $108 billion.
与此同时，英伟达已成为全球市值最高的上市公司，市值超4.3万亿美元。而曾经远超英伟达的英特尔如今市值仅为1080亿美元。