Gelsinger too would take a salary cut, Intel said. Still, his total compensation, including stock awards, rose to $16.9 million in 2023 from $11.6 million the year before, a proxy filing shows. Around this time, Gelsinger had high hopes for Intel's Gaudi chip, a so-called AI accelerator – a processor that improves the performance of artificial intelligence applications. Intel touted the chip – designed in-house and made by TSMC – as an alternative to Nvidia's often scarce GPUs. Teams at Intel estimated it could sell at most $500 million in AI chips, three people familiar with the forecast said. In a meeting with executives in the second quarter of 2023, Gelsinger said this number was not high enough. Intel needed to tell Wall Street it could hit at least $1 billion at a time when Nvidia's comparable sales were far higher, one of the people cited Gelsinger as saying.