Qualcomm has appointed former SVP and GM of Intel Foundry Services Kevin O’Buckley as VP of global operations and supply chain.

O’Buckley will begin his new role on March 2, reporting directly to Qualcomm’s EVP, CFO, and COO, Akash Palkhiwala.

“Kevin brings deep operational expertise, proven commercial leadership, and decades of experience scaling complex semiconductor operations and delivering custom silicon products across data center and edge devices,” said Palkhiwala in a statement. “His leadership will further strengthen our global operations as we continue to deliver industry-leading products with high-performance, low-power computing, AI, and connectivity at scale.”

In response to a request for comment from CRN, a spokesperson for Intel said its foundry division remained “one of Intel’s highest strategic priorities” and that the “organization is focused on disciplined execution and delivering for customers.”

“We thank Kevin O’Buckley for his contributions to Foundry Services and wish him the very best as he pursues an opportunity outside the company,” the spokesperson added.

O’Buckley joined Intel in 2024, having previously held roles at GlobalFoundries, Marvell, and IBM, working at the latter for 17 years across a number of engineering roles. At Intel, a leadership restructure by the company’s CEO Lip-But Tan in September 2025 saw O’Buckley’s direct reporting line switch from Tan to Naga Chandrasekaran, who was appointed EVP and GM of Intel Foundry.

Intel has lost a number of executives in recent months. In November 2025, Intel’s chief technology and AI officer, Sachin Katti, left to join OpenAI as head of compute infrastructure, just over six months after accepting the role at the chipmaker.

Katti’s exit marked the fourth loss for Intel of executives involved with the development of the chipmaker’s hardware efforts, with Intel senior fellow and chief architect of Xeon products, Ronak Singhal, leaving the company in September after less than a year in the role. His departure followed that of his predecessor, Sailesh Kottapalli, in January 2025 to lead Qualcomm’s data center CPU unit.

Intel’s VP of data center AI product management, Saurabh Kulkarni, also left the company in November, having accepted the role as VP of data center GPU product management at AMD.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has overseen a number of personnel changes since taking over the top job in March 2025. His most recent leadership shuffle took place in September and saw him appoint Kevork Kechichian as EVP and GM of Intel’s Data Center Group (DCG). Intel’s DCG was previously overseen by the chief executive of Intel Products, but now reports directly to Tan.

The company has yet to appoint a new chief executive of Intel Products following the departure of Michelle Johnston Holthaus last year, who spent almost 23 years at the company.