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Intel announced Monday that CEO Pat Gelsinger has resigned after a difficult time at the company. The once-dominant chipmaker’s stock plunged as the company missed the AI ​​boom and was overtaken by most of its competitors.

Gelsinger took over as CEO of Intel in February 2021, returning to the company where he had worked for decades, including as chief technology officer. He had left Intel to serve as CEO of software giant VMWare for a while.

At Intel, Gelsinger was tasked with turning around the iconic American tech giant, which was struggling with unprecedented competition, production delays and the departure of top talent. But during his tenure, the company’s prospects continued to deteriorate as it became clear that the company had fallen behind in another major wave of technology, despite the U.S. government spending billions of dollars to support domestic chip manufacturing.

Intel stock (INTC) plunged 61% during Gelsinger’s tenure. The stock rose 3% in early trading.

The company announced in August that it would lay off 15% of its staff to cut costs by $10 billion and “fundamentally change the way we work,” as Gelsinger said at the time.

Intel once had a stranglehold on the global computer chip market, with Intel chips in PCs and Macs. But the mobile computing wave of the last two decades caught the company by surprise and left it falling behind the competition. In recent years, Intel has been left behind by the AI ​​wave.

The year after Gelsinger took over as CEO, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which took the world by storm. The rest is history: Nvidia, once a small Intel competitor, is now the world’s second most valuable company after betting heavily on chips that can power the massive data centers that power AI. Nvidia’s $3.4 trillion market value is 33 times larger than Intel’s $104 billion.

Nvidia shares have risen nearly 720% in the past two years as the company became the talk of the tech world and one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.

Intel’s struggles have raised questions about a possible takeover by a rival like Qualcomm, a possibility that could be more viable under the new Trump administration, which is expected to be less aggressive in pursuing antitrust concerns.

Gelsinger resigned as CEO and left Intel’s board of directors effective Dec. 1, the company said Monday. He will be replaced by interim co-CEOs David Zinsner, Intel’s chief financial officer, and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus, general manager of Intel’s client computing group, while the company searches for a permanent new CEO. Holthaus was also named the newly created CEO of Intel Products, which will oversee data center and AI product efforts, among other things.

“While we have made significant progress in restoring manufacturing competitiveness and building the capabilities to become a world-class foundry, we know we still have work to do within the company and are committed to restoring investor confidence.” said Intel Independent CEO Frank Yeary, who was named interim chief executive following Gelsinger’s departure, said in a statement.

“Under Dave and MJ’s leadership, we will continue to work diligently on our priorities: simplifying and strengthening our product portfolio and advancing our manufacturing and foundry capabilities while optimizing our operating costs and capital. We are working to create a leaner, simpler and more agile Intel,” Yeary said.

Intel’s new co-CEOs will oversee a risky and expensive attempt to shift the company’s business model to making processors for rivals like Apple, putting it into more direct competition with chipmaker TSMC. These efforts have been central to the Biden administration’s efforts to revive chip production on American soil. But here too there were delays.

Intel announced last week that the $8.5 billion grant the Biden administration awarded in March under the CHIPS Act to support the construction and expansion of its U.S. manufacturing facilities increased to 7.86 Billion dollars was cut after Intel postponed its schedule for investing in and opening some new factories. The company said the reduced bonus reflected a separate $3 billion government grant to make chips for the U.S. defense effort.

This story has been updated with additional details and context.