GigaOM Pro

Having doled out $9.5 billion since 1991, Intel Capital is not just about return on investment, but also about securing strategic gains for the chipmaker. Arvind Sodhani, head VC at Intel, revealed some of the reasoning behind the firm’s latest cleantech and smart grid investments, bluntly telling Fortune, “We want to get our Atom processor into meters, and there are 120 million households in the United States alone.” An Atom in every home and electric vehicle? That’s quite a leap from netbooks.