14 DAY TRIAL // Unexpectedly, Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, announced that it would not be associated anymore with the Science Talent Search in America.
STS is a program to find STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) talented minds in America’s high schools, reward them with cash, and offer them the opportunity to meet experts, high-profile engineers and IT professionals. However, it seems that Intel suddenly decided to back off from sponsoring the program after 2017, even though an international prize will run until 2019.
Apparently, Intel’s sponsoring costs the company about $6 million a year, something that amounts to barely represents 0.01 percent of Intel’s $55.6 billion in revenue last year, and for than insignificant sum of money, the company gets an important status among students and young science-minded people that will later look at Intel as a symbol of technological and scientific advancement.
Intel's silence indicates plans to move on to other popular contests
The benefits that Intel brings upon students are also substantial, Intel giving more than $1.6 million annually to students and schools, which is a major increase from the base $207,000 when it began its sponsorship in 1998. Apparently, Craig Barrett, a former chief executive of Intel, said he was “surprised and a little disappointed” by Intel’s decision.
He said that he had talked to Brian M. Krzanich, Intel’s chief executive for the last two years, about the contest and insisted that funding this program annually can be counted as “a rounding error” against Intel’s finances. This being true, it might suggest us that it wasn’t really a decision taken from a financial standpoint but rather something completely different.
Although Intel’s spokeswoman, Gail Dundas, couldn’t say why the company was ending its support. However, she mentioned that the company is struggling to shift to mobile computing devices, and although Science Talent Search is a thing of the past in Intel’s portfolio, the American giant is proud of its legacy in supporting the award.
According to New York Times the real reason behind Intel’s decision could be in fact that the company plans to team up with TBS in order to support Maker Faire or America's Greatest Makers (working title), a show that revolves around homemade devices.