Intel ‘Engaging With' White House After Trump Calls for CEO to Resign Over China Portfolio
Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan on Aug. 7 said the company is engaging with the Trump administration after President Donald Trump called for Tan's resignation over his alleged ties to Chinese companies with military backgrounds.
Tan, a chip veteran and prolific investor, took the reins of Intel in March as the embattled chipmaker tries to regain territory from its competitors.
Trump on Aug. 7 called for Tan's immediate resignation, after Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) raised concerns over Tan's history of investing in Chinese companies, including those with alleged ties to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), via Walden International; and over his tenure at Cadence Design Systems, which pleaded guilty in July to unauthorized selling of controlled chip design tools to a Chinese military university between 2015 and 2021, when Tan was CEO of the company.
Story continues below advertisement
In a statement , Tan said he 'fully share[s] the President's commitment to advancing U.S. national and economic security.'
The executive said that there has been 'a lot of misinformation' about his past roles at Walden International and Cadence Design Systems, and that Intel is 'engaging with the Administration to address the matters that have been raised and ensure they have the facts.'
In a separate statement , Intel said the company, its board of directors, and Tan are 'deeply committed to advancing U.S. national and economic security interests and are making significant investments aligned with the President's America First agenda.'
Tan, 65, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia. He was educated in Singapore and the United States and has been a U.S. resident for more than 40 years.
The long-term tech investor sat on the board of Intel for two years before stepping down in August 2024. He rejoined the board and was appointed CEO in March.
Story continues below advertisement
As founder and chairman of Walden International, a California-based venture capital firm that described itself as 'one of the pioneers in venture investing in China,' he was also a board member of multiple Chinese companies, including state-backed chipmakers Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) and Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMEC), and tech conglomerate Sina.
SMIC, a partially state-owned semiconductor foundry company, was blacklisted by multiple U.S. departments, including the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), as a Chinese military company.
According to a July 2020 statement , Tan, who, at the time, had been a SMIC board member for 18 years, said Walden International was 'the founding shareholder and close partner of SMIC at its founding in 2000.' Walden no longer holds a stake in SMIC.
AMEC, also partially state-owned, was designated by the DOD as a Chinese military company in 2021 and removed from the list in December 2024.
Story continues below advertisement
Tan was an AMEC board member between February 2005 and April 2020, his LinkedIn profile shows.
According to Wirescreen , which provides open-source intelligence on companies' links to China, Tony Zhang, a managing partner of Walden International, is currently on the board of AMEC.
In a report published in 2024, the House Select Committee on CCP, which investigated five U.S. venture capital firms, including Walden International, said U.S. investments had been 'critical to the early growth and success' of some of China's 'largest and most notorious AI and semiconductor companies, many of which are now blacklisted by the U.S. government over national security concerns,' and many of which are backed by the Chinese regime.
According to the report, SMIC, China's largest chip foundry, and its affiliates, received $125 million in early investment from Walden.
Story continues below advertisement
The committee said the firms have also invested in Chinese companies that are blacklisted by the U.S. government for supporting genocide or other human rights abuses or for supporting the Chinese military.
It's unclear whether Walden has divested from these companies.
Intel and the White House did not respond to The Epoch Times's request for comment by publication time.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Android Authority
12 minutes ago
- Android Authority
Chrome isn't for sale, but Perplexity just offered $34.5 billion anyway
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority TL;DR Perplexity AI has made a $34.5 billion cash offer for Google's Chrome browser. Google isn't selling Chrome and is appealing a court ruling that could one day force its sale. Perplexity says it has funding lined up and would keep Chrome open source with no search engine changes. Google might be forced to sell its Chrome browser in the future, thanks to a US court ruling that found it held an unlawful monopoly in online search. But while the case is still crawling through appeals, Perplexity is making an ambitious bid to swoop in early to buy it. Don't want to miss the best from Android Authority? Set us as a preferred source in Google Search to support us and make sure you never miss our latest exclusive reports, expert analysis, and much more. As reported by Reuters, Perplexity AI has tabled an unsolicited $34.5 billion cash offer to Google for Chrome, despite the fact that it isn't actually for sale yet. The three-year-old company is worth less than half that itself, but says it has unnamed backers ready to cover the cost. CEO Aravind Srinivas has a taste for headline-making bids. Earlier this year, he offered to merge with TikTok's US arm to help solve Washington's concerns about Chinese ownership. Perplexity's pitch includes keeping Chrome's underlying code open source, investing $3 billion over two years, and leaving its default search engine untouched. The startup argues this would preserve user choice and avoid future antitrust headaches. It's a bold target. Chrome has over three billion users and is central to Google's AI search push, making it unlikely the company would let it go until its legal avenues are completely exhausted. Analysts think that the fight could drag on for years, even if a court eventually orders a sale. Still, the fact that Perplexity — and reportedly OpenAI, Yahoo, and Apollo Global Management — are circling Chrome shows just how valuable the browser has become in the AI race. Follow
UPI
13 minutes ago
- UPI
AI startup Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B
San Francisco-based AI startup Perplexity offered to buy Google Chrome in a deal for tens of billions of dollars after it was valued at around $18 billion last month but gave a $34.5 billion unsolicited offer. File Photo (2018) by Sascha Steinbach/EPA Aug. 12 (UPI) -- AI startup Perplexity has offered to buy Google Chrome in a deal for tens of billions of dollars. The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence software company in July was valued at about $18 billion. The company made a $34.5 billion unsolicited offer to buyout Google's Chrome browser, The Wall Street Journal first reported. In addition, Perplexity said it would commit to keeping Google's open-source Chromium project. The Google Chrome browser, which launched in 2008, has a reported valuation of anywhere between $20 billion to $50 billion. Perplexity said multiple investors have agreed to back the deal despite its current valuation as it battles for supremacy in the AI marketplace with bigger names such as OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, which approached the company this year about its own potential acquisition of Perplexity. The AI-powered search engine Perplexity launched its AI-powered browser Comet last month. The unsolicited offer comes after the U.S. Department of Justice had suggested Google divest itself of Chrome stemming from the antitrust lawsuit Google lost in 2024 that said it violated U.S. antitrust law as a monopoly in search and text advertising. But Google officials have yet to reveal how the search engine giant plans to adjust. Google did not immediately reply to UPI's request for comment.
CNBC
13 minutes ago
- CNBC
White House says it's working out legality of Nvidia and AMD China chip deals
The Trump administration is still working out the details of its 15% export tax on Nvidia and AMD and could bring deals of this kind to more companies, the White House's Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. "Right now it stands with these two companies. Perhaps it could expand in the future to other companies," said Leavitt, the White House's spokesperson. "The legality of it, the mechanics of it, is still being ironed out by the Department of Commerce, and I would defer you to them for any further details on how it will actually be implemented," she continued. President Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that he had negotiated a deal with Nvidia in which the U.S. government approves export licenses for the China-specific H20 AI chip in exchange for a 15% cut of revenue. Advanced Micro Devices also got licenses approved in exchange for a proportion of its China sales, the White House confirmed. "I said, 'If I'm going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something, because I'm giving you a release,'" Trump said Monday. "We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets," Nvidia said in a statement this week. Trump said the export licenses for AMD and Nvidia were a done deal. But lawyers and experts who follow trade have warned that Trump's deal may be complicated because of existing laws that regulate how the government can charge fees for export licenses. The Commerce Department didn't immediately return a request for comment. The H20 is Nvidia's Chinese-specific chip that is slowed down on purpose to comply with U.S. export relations. It's related to the H100 and H200 chips that are used in the U.S., and was introduced after the Biden administration implemented export controls on artificial intelligence chips in 2023. Earlier this year, Nvidia said that it was on track to sell more than $8 billion worth of H20 chips in a single quarter before the Trump administration in April said that it would require a license to export the chip. Trump signaled in July that he was likely to approve export licenses for the chip after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited the White House. The U.S. regulates AI chips like those made by Nvidia for national security reasons, saying that they could be used by the Chinese government to leapfrog U.S. capabilities in AI, or they could be used by the Chinese military or linked groups. The Chinese government has been encouraging local companies in recent weeks to avoid using Nvidia's H20 chips for any government or national security-related work, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
