June 19th, 2026 — Intel has appointed semiconductor industry veteran Seok-Hee Lee as executive vice president of Intel Foundry, placing him in charge of the company’s advanced packaging, system integration and back-end manufacturing operations.
Lee will report directly to Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and will lead the development and manufacturing activities associated with advanced packaging and back-end technologies. The appointment forms part of Intel’s wider effort to strengthen its foundry business and position packaging as a dedicated operation with focused leadership.
The organizational change reflects the growing strategic importance of advanced packaging in artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and chiplet-based semiconductor designs.
As conventional transistor scaling becomes increasingly complex and expensive, semiconductor companies are placing greater emphasis on system-level integration.
Advanced packaging enables chipmakers to combine processors, memory, networking components, accelerators and other specialized dies within a single package. This approach can improve performance, bandwidth and power efficiency while allowing customers to use different manufacturing processes for different parts of a system.
For Intel, packaging is also an important differentiator in its effort to attract external foundry customers. Rather than competing only through process nodes, the company wants to offer customers a broader manufacturing platform covering wafer fabrication, chiplet integration, packaging and system-level optimization.
Intel said it is establishing advanced packaging as a focused business because of its growing complexity and its role in enabling heterogeneous integration across AI systems.
Lee will oversee:
His responsibilities will include helping Intel scale its packaging technologies for external customers and strategic partners.
Intel plans to increase the production scale of several advanced packaging platforms, including EMIB-T and HBI.
EMIB, or Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge, uses small silicon bridges embedded within a package substrate to connect multiple dies. The architecture provides high-density die-to-die connectivity without requiring a large silicon interposer underneath the entire package.
The technology is designed to support modular semiconductor systems in which logic, memory, I/O and other functions can be manufactured separately and subsequently integrated into a single package.
Intel is also developing HBI, or High Bandwidth Interconnect, as part of its next generation of system-integration technologies. Scaling these platforms will be important as AI accelerators and high-performance processors require increasingly complex connections between compute dies and high-bandwidth memory.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said Lee’s experience would help the company integrate leading-edge logic, memory, networking and other components into high-performance computing systems for foundry customers.
Lee joins Intel after serving as president and CEO of electric-vehicle battery manufacturer SK On. Before that, he served as president and CEO of SK hynix, one of the world’s largest memory semiconductor manufacturers.
His semiconductor career also includes previous engineering leadership experience at Intel and work in academia.
During his tenure at SK hynix, Lee played an important role in the company’s technology and manufacturing strategy. He was also involved during the period in which SK hynix acquired Intel’s NAND flash and solid-state-drive business, which subsequently became Solidigm.
Describing his appointment as a return to Intel, Lee said the company is well positioned to lead in advanced packaging as demand for system-level integration increases across AI and high-performance computing.
Following Lee’s appointment, Naga Chandrasekaran will continue as executive vice president of Intel Foundry but will concentrate primarily on front-end technology development and wafer manufacturing.
Chandrasekaran will oversee Intel’s efforts to accelerate the ramp of Intel 18A, Intel 14A and future process technologies. He will also retain responsibility for design enablement and the customer-facing functions supporting Intel Foundry.
The new structure creates a clearer division between two major areas:
Intel believes this operating model will provide greater focus and improve its ability to execute consistently across both wafer manufacturing and packaging.
The company also announced that Navid Shahriari, executive vice president and longtime packaging and manufacturing leader, will retire after 37 years at Intel.
Intel continues to face strong competition from TSMC and Samsung Foundry in contract semiconductor manufacturing. However, advanced packaging may provide the company with an opportunity to establish customer relationships even when the customer’s dies are fabricated by another foundry.
A customer could, for example, manufacture different chiplets using several semiconductor processes or foundry suppliers and then use Intel’s packaging technology to integrate those components into a complete system.
This gives Intel the potential to participate in semiconductor programs without initially winning the complete front-end wafer-manufacturing business.
Once a customer adopts Intel’s packaging ecosystem, Intel may also have opportunities to offer additional services, including process technology, design enablement, assembly, testing and system integration.
The appointment reinforces Intel’s ambition to operate as more than a conventional wafer foundry.
Its strategy increasingly focuses on providing customers with a systems-level manufacturing platform combining advanced process technologies, chiplets, packaging, memory integration and high-volume manufacturing.
For AI and high-performance computing customers, the performance of the final product is no longer determined solely by the transistor technology used to manufacture an individual die. Memory bandwidth, interconnect density, thermal management, power delivery and package architecture have become equally important.
By placing advanced packaging under dedicated executive leadership, Intel is signalling that back-end manufacturing will be a central part of its foundry strategy rather than simply the final stage of semiconductor production.
Lee’s ability to scale Intel’s packaging technologies, secure external customers and coordinate the integration of logic, memory and networking components will therefore be an important test of Intel Foundry’s broader turnaround strategy.
