Charles Lyons-Burt
Executive Mosaic is pleased to enshrine the work of Cameron Chehreh with the 2023 Wash100 Award. This year, we celebrate the Intel public sector vice president and general manager for his leadership in advancing semiconductor chip technology production and in helping to forge partnerships, especially with research and educational institutions.
2023 marks the 10-year anniversary of the Wash100 Award as well as Chehreh’s first win. The honor is given after much deliberation by EM’s esteemed committee, who review hundreds of candidates to determine who are simultaneously the most accomplished professionals in the government contracting and federal sectors and the ones who are destined to deliver top-notch results in the coming year. Recipients of the Wash100 are leaders in their fields, and the award is a bellwether of innovation, vision and reliability.
The popular vote contest is the most ‘pure fun’ aspect of the Wash100 process. Vote for Chehreh and your other favorite Wash100 recipients today at Wash100.com!
Chehreh was finally recognized for his current post at Intel, where he joined in February 2022. Prior to Intel, he has built a career over 25 years across the GovCon space, holding roles such as enterprise solutions architect at Northrop Grumman Information Technology, chief technology officer of multiple divisions at General Dynamics Information Technology and most recently, vice president and CTO of Dell Technologies Federal Systems.
“Cameron has become a fixture in the industry for technological expertise, and he is well-suited for the parabolic shift of integrated circuit fabrication currently underway as we pivot away from our reliance on Singapore,” remarked Jim Garrettson, CEO of Executive Mosaic and founder of the Wash100 Award.
At GDIT, he had a major hand in founding the commercial cyber services business, which bolstered the company’s cybersecurity offerings to private sector clientele. He is now transferring what he learned satisfying private sector companies to oversee public sector technology delivery at Intel. (His work at Dell and Northrop Grumman also focused on government customers.)
Chehreh remains an authority on cybersecurity. In June 2022, he participated in an interview with Federal News Network about the implementation of zero trust, the policy mandated by the Biden Administration via Executive Order for all government agencies by 2024.
The Intel executive called zero trust “the most transformative strategy and thinking shift we’ve had in cyber in the last several decades,” and added, “We are just swimming in an ocean of new data, but it’s unstructured. It’s unfiltered. It’s unvetted. Instead of us just storing oceans of data that have no value, find a way to determine what is valuable and what’s not. Get rid of what’s not, and then ensure you’re making decisions based on that.”
In September 2022, Intel began building the first of two modernized semiconductor chip manufacturing plants in Ohio through a $20 billion initiative called Silicon Heartland. Signaling the importance and support of the government behind the project, President Biden and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine were in attendance at the ground-breaking ceremony. Under this endeavor, the company intends to stand up the pair of facilities by 2025.
“As a leading semiconductor provider, Intel provides the building blocks for digital transformation: ubiquitous compute, pervasive connectivity, cloud-to-edge infrastructure, artificial intelligence and sensing. This is one of the many reasons why I was excited to join Intel as vice president and general manager of public sector,” Chehreh wrote in a GovCon Expert article about the interdependent network of technologies underlying government services, which he dubs “digital mission infrastructure.”
In continuation of the American semiconductor production mission, which seeks to center chip manufacturing in the U.S., Intel announced a collaboration with Brookfield Asset Management’s infrastructure arm in August 2022 to pay for the expansion of its Arizona-based Ocotillo campus. This project will see the establishment of two new factories and the total cost could reach $30 billion.
Intel’s spirit of partnership in 2022 did not just extend to private equity firms but also to several educational and research organizations. The National Science Foundation and Intel together introduced a program to fund training and knowledge-sharing for the semiconductor manufacturing workforce. Each party will contribute $10 million and the effort is also aimed at making STEM education more accessible to disadvantaged students at two-year colleges and four-year universities alike.
A little over two months into Chehreh’s tenure as public sector VP and GM, Intel also began a joint undertaking with the University of Texas at Austin and Computer Vision Center Barcelona through a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Together, the organizations will devise simulation platforms for off-road autonomous combat vehicles. The project is entitled the Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency – Simulation program.
The breadth of Intel’s work and Chehreh’s expertise is impressive. Executive Mosaic congratulates Cameron Chehreh and his team for their hard-earned 2023 Wash100 Award and looks forward to seeing what’s in store — especially for federal customers — at the chip-manufacturing powerhouse in the upcoming months.
