 Welcome back to theCUBE, everyone. The leader in live tech coverage coming to you live from Las Vegas. It's HPE Discover 2023, day one of theCUBE's coverage, Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante. We had a great morning, Dave, with Antonio Neary's keynote. We knew we were going to hear a lot about AI. We're going to be talking with one of our alumni next from Intel, going to be talking about how customers can make AI deployments successful. It's a big challenge. Yeah, and AI is in the news, Intel is in the news. Guys are building factories all over the world. It's great to see the public-private partnership kicking in. It's great for the country, so welcome to theCUBE. It's great to see you. It is, and Greg Ernst is here. Corporate Vice President Intel Sales & Marketing and GM, America's Sales Intel. Greg, welcome back, great to have you. My pleasure, thank you. So talk a little bit about HPE and Intel have been partners for quite a long time. Since we're here at HPE event, give us a little bit of context, give the audience some really kind of the status of the partnership. Yeah, no, that's great. Intel and HPE, we've been working 30 years together. They're one of our absolute leading customers, partners, go to market. We have a 360 degree relationship. We rely on them heavily to really take our great semiconductor products and put system solutions around it to make the technology accessible. So whether it's government agencies, cloud companies, telcos, enterprises, it's partners like HPE that Intel really needs, that extracts the value of that compute power and brings it. And I've had a great relationship with HPE. A few years of my career, actually four years, I led our HPE accounting. I got to lead the team when HPE split into HPE and HPE out. AI hot topic, the hottest topic, one of the hottest topics on the planet. Everyone's talking about generative AI and all these great sorts of things. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing the companies have? Because we hear leaders say in Antonio said something similar this morning, like if you're not already invested in AI or working with it, you're already behind. What are some of the challenges customers are coming to Intel saying help us with all these so we can actually become leading edge here? I think most, well, in the generative AI space, I think it's emerging. So if companies don't have a plan, don't have a strategy, they're actually, I would say, more in the norm. But clearly that's where the world's going. This is a dynamic thing. Antonio made bold claims today about it being the biggest thing in a generation and I could see that. But most companies, I talk to, they're in this phase now of understanding what data they have, putting it in a searchable format, organizing the data. They're starting now working through algorithms and what use cases they're hiring. And that's a big thing right now is the skills and the labor. And Intel's happy to advise on all those. One area that obviously, what we're strongest with is then the actual compute infrastructure, which can be complex, it can be a large investment and at a time right now where there's still some economic uncertainty for enterprises, making that capital outlay and whether it's on-prem cloud, whether they build their own, there's a lot of big decisions that they have to make. And you guys have been, I can't remember wrong, shipping AI technologies for a long time. I don't know what the history of it is. It's like AI is everywhere, but maybe you can help our audience to sort of understand Intel's strategy with respect to AI. Yeah. Well for us, we've got, and right now, generative AI has got all the buzz, right? But for us, it's, to your point, it's, AI has been integrated into software for years now. We've got, Intel's got a big, big play around video image AI. We have a whole software suite of tools that we call, that's OpenVINO, open source base, and it allows companies to train their video use cases. It's great for Edge, right? Retail, manufacturing, hospitality, they have it deployed. So there's that class and then there's another class that's emerging, but here too, which is AI use cases on the PC. So early during COVID, we spent a lot of time on video conferencing and the editing out of the background, being able to track the pupil of the eyes, even if you look, all that's AI driven, and then there's this newer space around generative AI that's exploded and the large language modeling, and that's what everyone's talking about these days. Which is really where the GPU comes in, right? And again, but you're shipping GPUs, right? I mean, that's something that you've been, Yeah, we've, we've got a GPU class called GPU Max, Oregon National Labs, actually deployed an exascale cluster with us, funded in partnership with the Department of Energy, that uses six GPUs per cluster. And then, one thing that we've brought in now is really taking that same compute technology, which is matrix math, is that's what's great for excels on AI is matrix math, and we've actually onboarded accelerators built into just our high volume Zeons, and customers are seeing 10X improvement versus the previous gen on PyTorch, TensorFlow, some of these models. So for us, that's one thing that we see, it's GPUs got a lot of buzz, but for us, we just see there's a lot of benefit of taking the same accelerators, putting it in the high-purpose CPUs, that way customers can offload some of those AI compute tasks to the dedicated advanced matrix extensions while still using the CPU to run everything else. And is there a sustainability angle there? Cause we'd mentioned AI is super hot, so is sustainable IT. How is Intel and HPE helping customers achieve that? Cause every customer has, these days, has a requirement to be net zero or carbon neutral by a certain year. Right. Yeah, they're almost opposing, right? You got this insatiable demand for compute, but at the same time, we have an incredible responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint. So you add these two counterbalances, and that's where Intel's one of the few CPU companies on Earth that we design the products and we manufacture. And so for us, the first big thing that we want to do is environmentally friendly in all the markets where we manufacture. And we're around the world, we continue to expand there. 93% of our products now are actually built using reusable energy. So 93%, we've actually achieved a positive water reuse. So between the water that we recycle plus the reclamation projects, we actually return more water to the Earth's surface than we take out. And so for us, that's a big part, but then as we said, we design the products as well for power optimizations. That's one of the reasons why we believe these integrated accelerators are key because that'll help, again, reduce the compute power required to run these tasks. So for us, it's to build the products, which is scope one, and then also help our customers run on what's scope two and scope three. To the world used to be so simple, right? You had chips for PCs, you had chips for enterprise, and they run on SAP and some Microsoft workloads, a little bit of Oracle database. Okay, great, that has changed, right? So how has that affected how you go to market? Well, for us, I mean, I love it. So I'm an electrical engineer by trade and for 20 years of my career, no one really was concerned about compute or wanted to know all the details underneath. So for me, this is, it's fun. All of a sudden now computing, GPUs, CPUs, it's all the rage and more and more, we get to like spin our propellers and get deep. So for us, it's great now. Going to market though, what's been exciting is just, and even over the last eight months, just the explosion of the number of companies in this space from the software vendors to AIs, the service companies, Antonio announced right there in the large language modeling public cloud. So just the new partnerships is exciting. But I think for enterprises, it could be overwhelming of where to make, again, where to make the bets. And that's where I'm spending a lot of my time, personally, has helped digesting all this and that's the role you all play. Well, you think about it, everybody wanted to get remote work right. Yeah. Nobody did. Right, that changed. And then everybody wanted to get digital, right? And then just as they thought they had their hands around that, you get these weird macro trends going on. And now it's like everybody's trying to get AI right. There's a lot of uncertainty out there. What do you, how do you see the future of this playing out? I mean, you've seen waves before. I think the next, I think this where a lot of these AIs of service companies can really help because what they'll do is, they'll help companies advise and companies, if I were them, I would try multiple things, don't, before going in big, deep on one approach. So I actually see all these companies exploding as a great thing. Especially, as we said earlier with, we still have uncertain times in the markets, right? And so, and future earnings, some companies are still uneasy what their future earnings look like. So making, staging some of these investments, I think is the right approach. And then learning from the great innovation. So any, that's the approach I recommend. In the last few years, how have your customer conversations evolved? Where customers are talking about chips, but also AI, sustainability, needing to really be able to make a big impact, to not just survive the last couple of years, but thrive and be competitive. How have you seen customer conversations change between levels and priorities and boards? I'd say, and we were talking earlier, responding to COVID was one, building hybrid cloud strategies kind of before that. To me, the top thing now that's emerged, I mean, we talked about AI, but it's, to me, it's the sustainability and the commitments that a lot of companies have around sustainability. And they recognize that their compute for prints a big part of it. And so that's, and that's exciting for me, because Intel are one of our great founders, Gordon Moore. Most, a lot of people don't realize, he was environmentalist first. And so, and charity after he was done working was regenerating natural spaces and protecting natural spaces. So it's in our DNA. And frankly, I feel like it was underappreciated by the world of just, there's an environmental friendly way to build semiconductor companies in manufacturing. And it takes purpose. It does take investment. It's got to be part of the DNA. So for me, it's been great. We publish every year to our sustainability report. It's got targets, it's got progress. We hold ourselves accountable. It's just like our annual report. And are your customers coming to you saying, hey, Intel show us this, because if we want to come be with an RFP, we have a requirement within our organization to be net zero by X year, and we need help with our compute power from partners like Intel to achieve it. Yeah, I think reusable energy reducing the carbon footprint or eliminating greenhouse gas are the two big ones. That thing, that as an industry, we still have work to do, which is really creating a repeatable way to measure this. And what is the correct way to measure it? And it's one of the things that Intel being standards driven company for years. To me, we've got a big responsibility of help build those standards so that companies have a repeatable measure way to do it. And when they make these claims, they know what they're signing up for. And then frankly, they can hold themselves accountable. The accountability is key. Yeah, yeah, and I think all of them, it's just, they want to feel that too, right? It's not just that other people are going to hold them accountable. It's like they want to make commitments and meet them, right? Yeah, speaking of Intel founders, I wrote a piece during COVID, early part of COVID breaking analysis. Pat Gelsinger has the channel as best Andy Grove to recreate Intel. So he's been at it, no doubt. How has Pat's presence at Intel sort of affected the culture back to its roots? He's incredibly focused individual. We see him, he's out there. He's talking to governments. He's talking to the audience. He's talking to leaders. How has it changed? Noticeable, I'm sure it is, but what can you tell us about the, what's going on inside? Well, Pat's a force of nature. Yeah, no doubt. He's my boss's boss. He, every morning he's up at 3.55 AM. Wow. Responds to emails for five minutes and then goes and works out. So I always wake up to five minutes of emails. But I love working for Pat. And in our customers love it too. We've been on a journey really to bring back our technology, innovation, excellence, since Pat's joined. We talk a lot at our company of something called five nodes in four years, which means five manufacturing, semi-conductor manufacturing transitions in the next four years. Good news is two of them are already done. So since Pat came, we said five and four years, two are done, the last three are in track. And for us, that's really like our mega OKR that keeps us on track to Moore's Law. So that has been a focus. And then the other big thing that we were talking about when I walked up here is Pat's brought just an incredible accountability for us to create that global sustainable resilient supply chain for semi-conductors. We're trying to move half the world's semi-conductors to the Western Hemisphere. So Europe and the Americas. Today, it's 80% is done in Taiwan. And just given all the geopolitical tensions, that could be risky. And so we've, Pat's brought that. And then the other thing Pat's brought is as part of that, we're willing to open our factories up for any semiconductor company and be their foundry partner. And traditionally that wasn't the case. But what Pat's leadership is like, hey, not only should we build the factories, we need to open it up for the rest of the ecosystem to build. And so for me, those are big three things, right? Five nodes in four years, build out the semi-conductors supply chain and then becoming a foundry company in a big way. And as well, correct me if I'm wrong, but your designers also have choices in terms of where things are manufactured. Is that correct? As far as which site? Yeah. Which site and even, aren't you even tapping some other foundries? Or is that not, am I mistaken on that? Is it all? No, is it all? Yeah, we've announced some acquisitions that we're still working through all the regulatory authorities to close. But that would bring some additional IP purpose built for things like public sector as an automotive, exactly. Yeah, so like I said at the top, it's great for the country. It's great for I think the balance, geopolitical balance, and we need a strong intel. And it's a challenging business, expensive business, right? And so the other thing Pat's done is he's done a good job convincing different governments to help out and put up some dough. The momentum sounds great. It sounds like there's a really good mix of some of the original Intel DNA that you talked about, along with cultural shift, which is what so many storied institutions aim to achieve. Greg, we thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us what's new with Intel, your partnership with HPE, and some of the things, industry trends and customer opportunities that excite you most. You have to come back. Well, thank you. Thanks for everything the two of you do. Thank you, appreciate it. Our pleasure. We appreciate it. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and up next, two CUBE alumni from VMware and HPE join us to talk about HPE GreenLake with VMware, partnerships, opportunities, and more. Stick around, we'll see you in a minute.