How Intel's CEO Helped Create China's Chip Industry (msn.com) 67
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who faces calls for resignation from President Trump, helped build China's semiconductor industry over four decades. Tan's San Francisco-based Walden International, founded in 1987, was invited by Chinese officials to introduce venture capital to China in 1993, WSJ reported Friday. The firm invested in SMIC, China's largest chip manufacturer, where Tan served as board director for at least 18 years until the Commerce Department restricted the company in 2020. Walden also backed Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment, now worth $17 billion and a leader in China's chip-manufacturing sector.
During Tan's tenure as Cadence CEO from 2009-2021, the company sold banned technology to a Chinese university conducting military simulations, resulting in a 2025 guilty plea and $140 million settlement. These investments, once common among Silicon Valley venture capitalists and U.S. university endowments, now appear problematic amid U.S.-China tensions and Washington's restrictions on chip exports to China.
Tan wrote in a blog post late Thursday that there had been a "lot of misinformation" circulating about his past roles. "Over 40+ years in the industry, I've built relationships around the world and across our diverse ecosystem -- and I have always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards," Tan wrote.
During Tan's tenure as Cadence CEO from 2009-2021, the company sold banned technology to a Chinese university conducting military simulations, resulting in a 2025 guilty plea and $140 million settlement. These investments, once common among Silicon Valley venture capitalists and U.S. university endowments, now appear problematic amid U.S.-China tensions and Washington's restrictions on chip exports to China.
Tan wrote in a blog post late Thursday that there had been a "lot of misinformation" circulating about his past roles. "Over 40+ years in the industry, I've built relationships around the world and across our diverse ecosystem -- and I have always operated within the highest legal and ethical standards," Tan wrote.
Re:So the misinformation has some truth to it... (Score:5, Informative)
I've got some damn old Intel CPUs with "MALAY" stamped on them. Intel bailed on US manufacturing way before it became trendy to hate on offshoring. It's less Trump was right this time and more Trump is stating the obvious, in his usual ignorant blustery manner.
Even the "closing the barn door after the horse has run off" adage seems more than a little lacking here. Intel pretty much figured that designed in the USA - manufactured elsewhere would continue to be a viable business model for the foreseeable future. Spoiler alert: it wasn't.
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And yet, there are numerous other companies who use this same model. Look at their packaging. Designed in USA, made in China (usually China), but also Philippines, Thailand, etc.
Let's see if these companies get the same treatment. Spoiler alert: they won't.
Sure it was (Score:1)
America is an empire. Our military is the iron fist. That's pretty obvious and even you've got to understand that.
But what about the Velvet glove? It sure is shit isn't foreign policy we're not very good at that.
It's our monetary policy. We use our national debt to lock people into our currency. The enormous military means that it's a safe bet because nobody's going to drag us into a war. And the big threat to a cur
Re: Sure it was (Score:2)
"We use our national debt to lock people into our currency."
What if private agents on their own decide they prefer final settlement in US dollars, because US asset markets are a safe bet, and the Fed's willingness to expand the public money supply is an insurance policy against panics?
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America is an empire. Our military is the iron fist. That's pretty obvious and even you've got to understand that.
That's not true.
If it were true, then France would not have been allowed to crash the Bretton Woods system in 1971.
Dude this shit was put in place by Nixon (Score:1)
The factory workers were fucked either way because automation was coming for their jobs. But nobody likes to talk about or think about technological unemployment because the moment you do people start braying like donkeys repeating the word Luddite over and over and over again occasionally stopping to belch out a comment about buggy whips.
I used to wonder why Europe let the Russians put Tru
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So we use the debt to artificially inflate the value of the American dollar and then we bring in trillions of dollars of imports for a fraction of their actual value.
If you haven't figured it out I will spell it out in simple terms
PLEASE spell it out. This makes no sense to me. First, Americans pay more Chinese. I buy Chinese stuff and look at the same stuff on Amazon. Before the recent tariffs, Americans paid 4-8x more than Chinese, excluding top tier premium items (which aren't cheaper in China, nor are the high sellers at Walmart and Costco). IMO this is mostly logistics costs, but it flies in the face of the idea of Americans paying a fraction of the value. And what even is a fraction? Is it 8/1? I think you meant something more
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Scarcely any of this screed has anything to do with Lip Bu Tan so you can kindly fuck off with that shit.
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Even the "closing the barn door after the horse has run off" adage seems more than a little lacking here. Intel pretty much figured that designed in the USA - manufactured elsewhere
Intel has been designing in foreign countries since the 1970s.
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Intel pretty much figured that designed in the USA - manufactured elsewhere would continue to be a viable business model for the foreseeable future. Spoiler alert: it wasn't.
Not for Intel. It has worked for Apple, NVidia, Qualcomm, and Broadcom though.
Re:So the misinformation has some truth to it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Using a few simple truths to cover up bigger lies. Oldest trick in the book. The dude is a shit bag and you need to start questioning the motives behind every single thing.
My opinion, and this is simply an opinion, I don't have proof. Is that Trump is anti-capitalist. He does not want to see free enterprise in this nation. Instead he wishes to consolidate the power of industry under the Executive Branch. He essentially is taking steps to create a very American form of a fascism to supplant liberty, democratic, and capitalism. The Soviet Union could not beat us in the Cold War, but it turns out we were far more vulnerable to an enemy within than we realized.
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This gets a bit into semantics, but I would say most of the rich are anti-free market. They want capitalism, but they want to control/create a dominate company and make excessive profits. Trump isn't competent enough to do that in the market, so he's switched to government which is more suited to his "skills". Now he's just openly corrupt which favors
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My opinion, and this is simply an opinion, I don't have proof. Is that Trump is anti-capitalist. He does not want to see free enterprise in this nation.
You mean that man who, for his entire life, has made and lost money and then made it again in everything from real estate to entertainment to casinos? The man who has argued all of his life that free enterprise is the solution to so many problems?
no empathy (Score:2)
The man who has argued all of his life that free enterprise is the solution to so many problems?
I'm not convinced he is capable of recognizing that anyone but himself has a problem that needs solving.
has made and lost money and then made it again
Starting off with $413 million of inheritance is surely a good start to amassing a fortune. I'm guessing you don't even have to be a terribly savvy businessman to grow that kind of initial wealth.
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If LBT is actually guilty of anything, let the Justice dept deal with it. There's no need to try to tank Intel stock to make it easier for TSMC to buy them out.
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If LBT is actually guilty of anything, let the Justice dept deal with it. There's no need to try to tank Intel stock to make it easier for TSMC to buy them out.
They are.
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Leave it to Trump to make the DoJ's job harder by commenting publicly on an ongoing investigation.
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Leave it to Trump to make the DoJ's job harder by commenting publicly on an ongoing investigation.
I agree - that boy ain't too bright. If there is actionable evidence, it could present an opportunity for destruction of other evidence.
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That's some bullshit.
If Trump want's us to believe that the sky is blue then he should have stopped telling it was green for the past 9 years.
Trump lies. His media lie. His supporters lie. He just lies all the time. Even if he said it was blue I'd have to go check and make sure he didn't nuke it red and was trying to cover it up.
I'd say if he was serious he should have his DOJ do an independent investigation but whoops! Can't trust them or Bondi either, they're just another set of lying lackeys.
This is
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Re: So the misinformation has some truth to it... (Score:1)
I've been paying attention. I've seen him call the sky blue only for every democrat-aligned pundit and academic to insist it's green, multiple times. The instance that comes to mind first is when he said schools should be in-person, followed by the dems insisting that anything other than keeping schools remote for a year and a half was anti-intellectual.
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"our diverse ecosystem" (Score:1)
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If I were IBM that fucker would be out quick...if for not for the security risk, but the coming stock drop.
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Not that I want to defend this fucker. His shortsighted stock buy backs fucked the company hard.
But the part I find funny and what's almost certain to get me modded down is how Russia is no longer a viable threat having proven that they can't even take over a nation of 20 million without throwing half their population into the meat grinder.
But we need a big scary threat in order to
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China being an aggressive, antagonistic country to the US is nothing new.
I've been familiar with it for most of my life....they're more of a threat these days, especially with their build up of their armed forces, etc.
It's nothing new...they're are an old enemy
Corporate espionage (Score:2)
1. Steal the secrets
2. Destroy the company
3.
4. Profit!!!
Life isn't as cool or dramatic as that (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel spent the last 15 years doing non-stop stock buy Backs instead of investing in their company .
As a result they only had enough money to bet on one or two technologies and if either of those didn't make gangbusters money they were fucked.
Neither of the two technologies they have been working on have paid off. And they didn't blunder into anything amazing through sheer luck with smaller investments because trying to get into those spaces like the ultra low power mobile CPUs or competing with Qualcomm on cell phone modems was always going to be incredibly expensive and starved for cash from stock buy backs.
This is a symptom of the crap that started in the '80s where we started to dismantle everything we put in place after the Great depression.
I'm just glad we aren't doing any of the things that historians say caused the last Great depression like engaging in widespread incredibly risky integration of high-risk assets into Wall Street and main Street or having droughts or doing a massive and utterly pointless trade war in order to create a national sales tax or....
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Intel spent the last 15 years doing non-stop stock buy Backs instead of investing in their company .
True. Note that the biggest buybacks occurred under the CEO who has an MBA and whose employment history was on the financial side, not engineering.
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I think the only reason it took so long for Intel to go all in on them is because they were making so much money hand over fist in the '80s through the early 2000s because of the . com bubble and because they didn't have any viable competition whatsoever.
Don't forget all the antitrust violations Intel did. The only reason they aren't the only company for x86 CPUs is because Microsoft propped up AMD
Re: Life isn't as cool or dramatic as that (Score:2)
Do you labor under the delusion that Nvidia doesn't do stock buybacks? How come they have a Chinese CEO too?
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Even AMD has held stock buyback recently.
Directory of SMIC? (Score:5, Insightful)
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DEI is protect employees from Trump-like hiring managers.
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SMIC has done pretty fucking amazing things with DUV. It's flatly inferior to EUV- but still, they did shit with DUV that people were certain was impossible, lacking access to EUV.
That's innovation. Are you trying to imply that since the dude has a Chinese sounding name, we should ignore that he's a US Citizen of Singaporean descent?
He wasn't the director (what does that even mean? President of the Board?), he was a director.
Hilary Clinton was a "director of Walmart" for 6 years? What is it you th
Re: Directory of SMIC? (Score:2)
Is Trump aware that Nvidia's CEO also has a Chinese name?
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Intel has also done some "amazing" things with DUV - Intel 7/10nm+++++ is a DUV node.
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They just started the work to get past 14nm so long ago that they couldn't abandon the investment (I guess?)
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Why? A valuable experience.
Re:Director of SMIC? (Score:2)
There is a lot of nuance to many "technology transfer violations", as regulators don't know and/or care enough to write clear-cut category descriptions, making it ad-hoc. Thus, maybe SMIC deserved a mulligan or two?
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You would think being the director of SMIC for 18 years would be an instant disqualification for intel... but here we are
Yeah, let's get more bean counters to run Intel. Maybe an MBA from the agriculture industry would be perfect. Has worked so well so far for Intel.
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It sounds very much like "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"
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In fact their main weapon, the SKS isn't really a weapon of war.
Here in Canada surplus SKSes are very popular amongst aboriginal and Inuit hunters, which is the only reason they are not (yet) on the ban list. If it was just white people owning them they would already be prohibited.
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Take a look at what happened to Chinese corpos in Angola. Interesting stuff.
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There is no West! (Score:2)
Ned Beatty Speech from Network [youtube.com]
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Borg called, want their speech back
Tan (Score:2)
if (Score:2)
If he's forced out as CEO, I predict he will go live in China.