After decades as the king of PC chips, Intel has struggled for the past few years watching rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia leap ahead with better performing processors.

But investors are already anticipating that Intel's troubles may be in the rearview mirror. In the two months since the company announced that VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, who had worked at Intel for 30 years, would be its next leader, its stock price has leaped 23%.

Now Gelsinger must deliver.

"It takes a long time for a new CEO to impact the product road map, but Gelsinger's credibility can buy time," Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore noted last week. Gelsinger is already generating much needed energy within the company, Moore adds. "We appreciate having that enthusiasm internally—and a CEO who can sell that vision to the engineering workforce, the data center community, and to ecosystem partners."

An electrical engineer who started at Intel before he even graduated from college, Gelsinger appears to have the deep knowledge of his industry to match rival CEOs Lisa Su at AMD and Jensen Huang at Nvidia. But Gelsinger will have to thread a careful path in explaining his comeback strategy after his two immediate predecessors, Bob Swan and Brian Krzanich, departed after overpromising and underdelivering on chip improvements.

On March 23 evening after the stock market closes, the new CEO will deliver his first strategy address and take questions from analysts. It's being billed as "Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future," with Gelsinger planning to explain his vision for "the new era of innovation and technology leadership at Intel."

"Innovation is alive and well, and we're far, far from done," Gelsinger told Fortune in an interview before his address. Noting some of the current shortages for semiconductors in key industries, Gelsinger said Intel's core business developing of processor chips "underlines every aspect of technology, which is becoming more pervasive in every aspect of human existence."

Unlike its main rivals, AMD and Nvidia, Intel not only designs chips but manufactures them too. Its biggest problem has been that the once reliable silicon chip manufacturing improvements that made its processors leap ahead in performance every two years or so, the trend identified by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore as Moore's Law, haven't arrived on schedule. A brand-new series of chips for PCs that Intel unveiled this month is being built with the same basic manufacturing technique that the company debuted in 2015.

And in a major departure from Intel's history, Gelsinger said Intel would build substantial extra capacity so it could become a major manufacturer of chips for other companies. That's the game plan rivals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung used to build their businesses and leapfrog Intel as suppliers to major chip designing companies like Apple, Samsung, and Nvidia.

Gelsinger also said Intel had "fully resolved" problems that delayed a major manufacturing improvement under prior CEO Swan. New processors for PCs using the technology, known as 7-nanometer, will be available for testing in the second quarter, he said. Still, given some of the mistakes and delays Intel made in the past, Gelsinger said Intel would need to outsource manufacturing of some of its upcoming products to rivals like TSMC, a stopgap strategy that prior CEO Swan had set in motion.

The bold strategy to regain technological superiority seized by competitors like Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung shouldn't come as a surprise from Gelsinger, who spent much of his career at Intel under its fiery and legendary CEO Andy Grove.

"Things are moving rapidly as we restore execution, rebuild the Grovian culture, and I'll say the new Intel starts today," Gelsinger said with obvious enthusiasm. Declaring several times during his interview that "the geek is back," Gelsinger also said that Intel will resume holding annual industry conferences, starting in October with an event in San Francisco dubbed Intel On to showcase the company's upcoming tech improvements and work with partners.

Another part of Gelsinger's plan announced on March 23 is to work more closely with IBM to develop the "foundational technologies" needed to make faster, more efficient chips.

The cost of spending more on new plants and accelerated research could sap funds Intel has typically used to buy back its shares over the past several years, a move that increases earnings per share but does little to improve the company's chips.

"I'm very confident that my board is 101% behind this," Gelsinger said when asked how Wall Street may react to his new plan. Investing in R&D, adding manufacturing capacity, and acquiring smaller companies "are the areas that will be the priorities for our capital investments," he added. "As the industry analysts and investors come to understand that and start to see the proof points behind that, it will be well supported in the markets as well."

Gelsinger said his overall strategy was guided not only by his prior 30-year history with the company but also by his subsequent 10-year tenure as CEO of software provider VMware.

"Every experience of my entire career is being used every single day," he said. "If there was an MRI taken on my brain, every neural pattern would be lit up in this experience."

Gelsinger's updates should include positive news on the company's delayed next manufacturing advance, known as 7 nanometer, and a clearer explanation of how much business Intel plans to outsource to Taiwan Semiconductor, UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri noted on March 22Monday. Gelsinger could also offer a long-term vision about how Intel will better compete for future computing demands related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. "We nonetheless see these as the first steps in a multiyear journey which should yield considerable upside for this stock," Arcuri wrote.

But more cautious analysts like Stacy Rasgon at Bernstein Research aren't sure Gelsinger can make any quick changes to boost Intel's competitive position in an industry in which new chip designs can take three to five years to reach market. "There is not much Intel can do to substantially alter the product trajectory over the next several years," Rasgon noted on March 22. Apple has already dumped Intel chips from its Mac computers for chips based on a design by British chip company Arm, and Amazon is likewise producing an in-house chip based on Arm for new servers, Rasgon added.

Arm is an "underappreciated threat," Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya agreed in a note last month. It's not just Apple's defection but the likelihood that cloud servers at Amazon, Google, and other companies will also shift to cheaper, in-house chips based on Arm. Google just hired longtime Intel exec Uri Frank to head its custom chipmaking push. Meanwhile Nvidia is trying to buy Arm and integrate its designs more closely, though it has run into antitrust objections.

The bottom line? Intel's share of the highly profitable server market could drop from more than 90% currently to under 70% in 2025, Arya warned.

Gelsinger will need to be very convincing to fend off more customer defections.