Does he write this ridiculous verbiage himself or does he have a team of people who "hone" it to this point? This could have been a four sentence email.
“In March 2025, Intel appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO,” Cotton wrote in the letter. “Mr. Tan reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies and has a stake in hundreds of Chinese advanced-manufacturing and chip firms. At least eight of these companies reportedly have ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”
It's honestly wild that a sitting US president is calling out specific company CEOs. The fact that it was done in a tweet-esque post is even more concerning. I'd expect that something like this would have been accompanied by a proper investigation and writeup stating the administration's perspective on why, but instead it's just "he's highly CONFLICTED".
I don't debate his history at Cadence Design is concerning from a national security point of view, but the approach the administration took really shows how we're in a different era of politics.
This administration (and the previous one) have been paying billions of dollars to chip companies to make fabs in the United States.
Trump in particular is essentially trying to make sure Intel lives despite market forces. It is effectively a quasi-nationalized entity akin to major military-industrial complex entities.
Given that, we are not talking about a random private entity. A US President making such statement about Intel is entirely justified.
The king, I mean unitary executive, has opinions and power to do all things without regard to law, without critical thinking or consideration if they are beneficial or harmful to humanity, and without boundaries.
This is why Tim Apple presented Dear Leader with a 24K gold award and so was rewarded by a tariff exclusion.
Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive.
Intel’s mobile CPUs remain extremely competitive. Their integrated GPUs are the fastest in the x86 space. And their SoC+platform features: video decode/encode, NPUs, power management, wifi, and so on are the best in class for x86 CPUs; they are usually a solid second place or better regardless of architecture.
Subjectively, the most interesting “mainstream” laptops on the market are still, and historically have been, Intel-based. I understand that in an era where the M4 Max, Snapdragon 8 Elite, and Strix Halo each serve as best-in-class in different segments, “mainstream appeal” no longer equates to market dominance. And that is bad news for an Intel that historically just make a few CPUs (the rest being market segmented down versions of those chips), but still, to suggest they will disappear overnight seems... odd.
First, you need to know the emotional bond between Chinese Malaysians and the Chinese Communist Party, before you can say his actions are not suspicious.
emotional bond with the CCP is a bit too specific; what I should say is that the older generation Chinese Malaysians always have an emotional bond towards China, especially the PRC.
The key question is this: how did the board of directors hire him knowing he had been subpoenaed to testify regarding Cadence Design Systems, and that the company has now agreed to plead guilty.
So now being a bad CEO who is not of European ethnicity, will have the sitting president insinuate you not so subtly for treason. Wild. A cursory Wikipedia search confirms Tan was born in Malaysia, has lived in US for 40+ years in California, and is a practicing Christian.
I view Intel as a company that has a huge number of missed opportunities:
1. They have excellent engineering resources - why didn't they just take their ARC cards and add more RAM to them? People are dropping $2K+ on the 5090 with 32GB and would surely pay $1200+ for an ARC with 32GB or even much more for one with 64GB or higher. Absolute performance wouldn't be the benchmark; being able to load larger models would make for excellent price/performance, for many lower-end uses.
2. We've been stuck at typical network speeds of 1GBit Ethernet for literally 20 years at this point. A first generation Opteron server like the Sun V20z (made by Newisys or Celestica, really) had dual-Gigabit interfaces; Intel should be pushing for 10Gb or higher as the bare minimum - and they make the 10Gb chips! More bandwidth capacity, even on the low end, will grow the computing market. And Intel has a big chunk of the market.
3. Intel did the same with their only offering dual-memory channel and thus much lower bandwidth of CPU <-> RAM ; unless you are buying an expensive server, you only get 2 channels to RAM; Apple increased their RAM bandwidth significantly and as it turns out, customers liked that, and bought more Apple CPUs.
Intel has to become "hungry" once more and stop their sedate, sclerotic ways. Maybe caring about their customers would help, too.
tl dr without all bullshit:
"False claims are circulating about my past roles. I’ve always acted to the highest legal and ethical standards, and I lead Intel the same way. The Board supports our work. This year, we’ll launch high-volume manufacturing on the most advanced U.S. semiconductor process—thanks to you. Stay focused. Our mission is clear, our impact critical."
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 58.4 ms ] threadFTA:
“In March 2025, Intel appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO,” Cotton wrote in the letter. “Mr. Tan reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies and has a stake in hundreds of Chinese advanced-manufacturing and chip firms. At least eight of these companies reportedly have ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”
"Has a stake in hundreds" is true of anyone who owns a global index fund.
In Soviet Russia you follow their rules and do everything/anything to win.
In US you follow the rules there and do everything/anything to win.
In China/India/country you follow the rules there and do everything/anything to win.
Through law, politics, advertising.
The ultimate goal is to win globally right?
A true capitalist leader can operate with complete lack of attachment for the sake of the corporation.
I don't debate his history at Cadence Design is concerning from a national security point of view, but the approach the administration took really shows how we're in a different era of politics.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033113
https://apnews.com/article/business-china-asia-beijing-race-...
Trump in particular is essentially trying to make sure Intel lives despite market forces. It is effectively a quasi-nationalized entity akin to major military-industrial complex entities.
Given that, we are not talking about a random private entity. A US President making such statement about Intel is entirely justified.
This truly never happened before. Oh wait:
https://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/gm-ceo-resigns-at-oba...
This is why Tim Apple presented Dear Leader with a 24K gold award and so was rewarded by a tariff exclusion.
Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive.
Intel’s mobile CPUs remain extremely competitive. Their integrated GPUs are the fastest in the x86 space. And their SoC+platform features: video decode/encode, NPUs, power management, wifi, and so on are the best in class for x86 CPUs; they are usually a solid second place or better regardless of architecture.
Subjectively, the most interesting “mainstream” laptops on the market are still, and historically have been, Intel-based. I understand that in an era where the M4 Max, Snapdragon 8 Elite, and Strix Halo each serve as best-in-class in different segments, “mainstream appeal” no longer equates to market dominance. And that is bad news for an Intel that historically just make a few CPUs (the rest being market segmented down versions of those chips), but still, to suggest they will disappear overnight seems... odd.
I'd bet 98% odds that Intel CEO and/or his comms team drafted this using an LLM trained on a competitor's chips.
Bearish. As if we even needed to know, at this point.
edit: Downvoters -- would you honestly take the other side of that bet?
What's the point of being Intel CEO if you give up?
He should resign.
A sort of corporate communications-whitewashed version of the My Cousin Vinny "Everything that guy just said is bullshit. Thank you."
1. They have excellent engineering resources - why didn't they just take their ARC cards and add more RAM to them? People are dropping $2K+ on the 5090 with 32GB and would surely pay $1200+ for an ARC with 32GB or even much more for one with 64GB or higher. Absolute performance wouldn't be the benchmark; being able to load larger models would make for excellent price/performance, for many lower-end uses.
2. We've been stuck at typical network speeds of 1GBit Ethernet for literally 20 years at this point. A first generation Opteron server like the Sun V20z (made by Newisys or Celestica, really) had dual-Gigabit interfaces; Intel should be pushing for 10Gb or higher as the bare minimum - and they make the 10Gb chips! More bandwidth capacity, even on the low end, will grow the computing market. And Intel has a big chunk of the market.
3. Intel did the same with their only offering dual-memory channel and thus much lower bandwidth of CPU <-> RAM ; unless you are buying an expensive server, you only get 2 channels to RAM; Apple increased their RAM bandwidth significantly and as it turns out, customers liked that, and bought more Apple CPUs.
Intel has to become "hungry" once more and stop their sedate, sclerotic ways. Maybe caring about their customers would help, too.