“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.”
everfrustrated · 49m ago
If true, questions should also be raised about the Board who must have signed off on any conflicts of interest.
threatripper · 6m ago
Nobody really knows if 18a is a failure or if it was turned into one by deliberate mismanagement. It feels like when Microsoft took over Nokia.
tiahura · 7m ago
This is entirely on the board. They didn’t know / They didn’t clear first with govt. Either way it’s grossly negligent.
dlyco · 3m ago
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.
What are the odds this ends with Intel getting nationalized? I think it's really looking kind of non-zero now.
emchammer · 2h ago
Thank god Apple has been putting their eggs in their home-woven ARM basket. Now I just wish that they had a CEO who was above golden-trophy ass-kissing.
dylan604 · 25m ago
Does it being "designed in California" but "made in Taiwan" really make a difference? If Taiwan was to be invaded and TSMC follows through with their threat of destroying all of the fabs, Apple's home-woven basket wouldn't be worth much at all
seszett · 17m ago
If the US or the Netherlands were being invaded that world also wreak havoc, but how is that related to the links between China and Intel's CEO?
dylan604 · 14m ago
Invading the US or Netherlands would not impact chip production. How are you not able to grasp that?
tengwar2 · 2h ago
Partly home-made. Arm Holdings is British-based, but owned by Softbank Group (Japanese).
gdiamos · 2h ago
Arm makes a specification and standard (the ARM ISA).
Apple licenses that and develops their own chip, which is then manufactured by TSMC.
So I guess if Intel dies the US will still have a few good CPU design firms, but no manufacturing
Also note that Foxconn (China) assembles the iPhones
Apple still holds the license to the arm arches/designs they've used. There's enough customization applied that I'd guess Apple could function absent ARM, even if it's not the ideal scenario for them.
Plus Britain and Japan are both somewhere between close allies and client states. Nobody cares if we license from them.
extraduder_ire · 2m ago
Apple is also not a regular ARM licensee. They have a special deal because they were a very early investor when they wanted a chip to power the Newton back in the day.
hinkley · 2h ago
Amd64 has other vendors.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
I hate everything that Cook is doing to kiss up to Trump and he did something similar during the first administration by letting Trump brag about final assembly of low selling Mac Pros was happening in the US.
But this is the country that the US wants (said as a born and bred US citizen) these are the results of it. Every CEO is kissing Trumps ass because that’s the only way you get ahead in the US now.
The media, the other two branches, colleges, tech companies etc have all bent a knee and bribed the President in one way or the other.
dylan604 · 24m ago
The fact he allowed Tim Apple to just hang out there was telling
hn_throwaway_99 · 2h ago
It doesn't need to get officially nationalized. Trump is already using tariffs to essentially direct large businesses. It's already been reported that Trump is requiring TSMC to take a 49% stake in Intel for tariff relief.
Dr4kn · 1m ago
Why would TSMC do this? Companies want the best chips and they can only get them from TSMC. If there isn't an alternative and building the necessary infrastructure in the US takes too long the Tarif is useless.
jjcm · 3h ago
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.
> [T]he NSA doesn't need a warrant for foreign targets.
That is correct. IIRC, FISA made that the law of the land since like the 1970s. However, Congress felt the need to provide retroactive immunity to the telcos who assisted in the FISA-violating wiretaps that the NSA demanded of them around the turn of the century. See Title II on printed page 32 of this [0] for more information, and check out newspaper coverage about the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008" around July, 2008.
This grant of retroactive immunity was particularly outrageous because it mooted in-progress civil suits against those telcos, which is not something that's supposed to be done at scale... especially for civil liberties violations.
That's a really odd thing to do if no law was violated, don't you think?
Eh. Without getting anywhere near the merits of this particular fracas, the federal government has gotten deeply involved in critiquing the management of companies like Lockheed and Boeing, both for national security reasons and because of the importance of those companies to the economy. Easy to see Intel fitting into that mold in 2025.
rco8786 · 3h ago
I don’t recall a sitting President publicly calling for the CEO of either of those companies to resign.
Please let’s not sanewash what is happening right now.
joules77 · 1h ago
Look up the Teddy Roosevelt era. Before his election and after he leaves.
morkalork · 2h ago
Lockheed's CEO Carl Kotchian resigned after political pressure but he brought it on himself.
These are news reports after the fact. It's not normal for a president to go on twitter and publicly deride someone into resigning.
tptacek · 2h ago
The norm that’s been transgressed here is getting more and more specific, isn’t it?
rco8786 · 2h ago
> a sitting President publicly calling for the CEO of either of those companies to resign.
That was my original "norm" I stated. What has gotten more specific about that?
magicmicah85 · 2h ago
Publicly or privately, why is one fine and the other not?
rco8786 · 1h ago
I'll answer this in earnest, assuming you're asking in good faith.
The president commands an enormous amount of power, and has an army of people who will do his bidding and simply adopt his opinions on any number of subjects. Shouting out to millions of his followers to state that the CEO of a private company is "CONFLICTED" and must resign is, by any definition, propaganda. Propaganda that changes the minds of the citizens of the country, riles up the base, and does nothing productive except to stoke anger and fear.
Working privately with this CEO, having a professional discussion with him, investigating the facts, determining that the best course of action for national security would be for him to step down, and maybe even putting some political pressure on that person to do so, and then publicly announcing the facts of what happened, is responsible governance.
It's genuinely an enormous difference.
magicmicah85 · 1h ago
I am asking in good faith and I understand why there would be a preference towards private versus public. It sounds like Trump does not care to attempt a private conversation as he wants Tan out. The Cadence settlement is likely the only public info we have about Tan's conflicts, the government has more info and they aren't going to spend time working through private channels, though it sounds like Tan is trying that now.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
The other hopefully happens after the President and his advisors talk behind the scenes. This isn’t a Republican vs Democrat thing. Republican presidents never did this before.
And that happened as part of the government bailing GM out.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 2h ago
The GM CEO had presided over a time when GM got into such bad shape they needed a government bailout, and had to come back asking for even more government money.
The Wells Fargo CEO presided over a major scandal involving customers being signed up for services they never agreed to.
What has the Intel CEO presided over during his short tenure that measures up to those?
tptacek · 2h ago
Vastly increased attention on semiconductor companies as national security assets coupled with fairly extensive business relationships with companies controlled by America's chief geopolitical rival.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 2h ago
Oh, so not the same kind of thing at all then...
tptacek · 2h ago
You'll notice that none of the examples on this thread are the same things.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 2h ago
Yeah, it seems like a lot of hot air to prop up a false equivalency.
tptacek · 1h ago
I suggest not asking questions you don't want the answers to.
antonvs · 15m ago
People are interested in valid answers, not gaslighting.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 1h ago
I suggest not normalizing Trump's behaviors by creating false equivalencies.
tptacek · 1h ago
I'm interested in what's actually happening, not how it feeds the narrative about Trump. We saw the same thing yesterday with a dozen people on HN het up about how the Library of Congress Annotated Constitution had removed Habeas from its online copy of the Constitution (along with the Navy, letters of marque and reprisal, and the No Favored Ports clause) and people said the same thing there: stop claiming this was just a website fuckup and normalizing Trump!
sjsdaiuasgdia · 1h ago
Yes, what actually happened is important.
In that Constitution story, a government website that has the Constitution's text was updated in a peculiar way. It could be interpreted as having been related to habeas corpus rights, as that was in the middle of the removal. It could also be interpreted as unintentional, as the deletion started in the middle of Article I Section 8. You'd think a targeted deletion wouldn't include so much unrelated text. Then again, you could say that it's just an incompetently done targeted deletion. It's debatable! Maybe it was intentional and maybe the order came from the top. Or maybe it was just a run of the mill tech SNAFU.
In this situation, Trump, on Trump's social media platform, posted that he wants this CEO to resign. That's not debatable, it's verifiable fact. It happened. We know the man at the top is saying this.
So yeah, stop with the false equivalencies and pay attention to what's actually happening.
tptacek · 1h ago
Just so we're clear that you apparently still think it's possible that an order came down from the top to delete Congress's authorization to form a Navy from the Library of Congress's online annotated Constitution, which isn't even in the first SERP for me on Google for "online constitution", but I guess you've gotta start somewhere.
fzeroracer · 21m ago
C'mon, surely you should know better by now to not give the current admin literally any iota of doubt. They've been frequently and outright violating individuals habeas corpus rights, it should come as no surprise that people would see this as the next step. They're the most powerful people in the world.
gibbitz · 2h ago
Meh, Trump wants someone as loyal and willing to spy on us as he thinks this guy was for China. I love how the right detests regulation but is okay with arbitrarily monkeying directly in the management of a company like this with no rules around it. No company is safe under this guy.
dkenyser · 2h ago
Correction: The right detests regulation on the things they like at that given moment.
If it doesn't affect them directly, or they can't perceive how it will affect them directly, they simply do not care.
goatlover · 2h ago
The MAGA right has demonstrated they have no principles other than whatever Trump wants at that given moment. We'll see whether the Epstein files is truly an exception to that.
rwmj · 3h ago
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.
rco8786 · 3h ago
He’s the CEO of a multi billion dollar company of course he has a comms team.
michaelteter · 2h ago
“The administration” does not deal in facts. It only works with themes and phrases that (fail to) give the small, unrecognized boy a sense of value.
If ever there were a case for the cost of lack of therapy, we are now witnessing it on a global, possibly catastrophic scale.
Just imagine if Hitler had been placed in charge of a superpower with our resources…
To be clear, we should not ignore the absolute reality that China and other powers are using every means available to influence global reality. But that is unrelated to the absurdity which we are now subject to.
The invisibility of Bush is the strongest indication that “the party of Reagan” is completely baffled and hiding from the monster that they and Rupert Murdoch created.
hinkley · 2h ago
Therapists don’t know how to fix narcissists. And narcissists don’t want to be fixed.
gjvc · 1h ago
who buys intel instead of AMD at this point?
nodesocket · 2m ago
I own both, though admittedly Intel has not panned out so far.
bornfreddy · 1h ago
Swing traders. Also those who think China-Taiwan conflict is imminent.
getnormality · 2h ago
Lots of en dashes.
xdennis · 2h ago
They looked too short to be em dashes and too long to be en dashes. Sure enough, they're neither.
They're minus signs. The AI is evolving.
threatripper · 8m ago
Must be a force of habit.
hinkley · 2h ago
Sigh. Guess I’m going back to using way too many commas and living in fear of misusing semicolons.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
number6 · 1h ago
I love semicolons and dashes. AI won't take them from me!
FTA:
“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.”
Apple licenses that and develops their own chip, which is then manufactured by TSMC.
So I guess if Intel dies the US will still have a few good CPU design firms, but no manufacturing
Also note that Foxconn (China) assembles the iPhones
Eg https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-factory-foxconn...
Plus Britain and Japan are both somewhere between close allies and client states. Nobody cares if we license from them.
But this is the country that the US wants (said as a born and bred US citizen) these are the results of it. Every CEO is kissing Trumps ass because that’s the only way you get ahead in the US now.
The media, the other two branches, colleges, tech companies etc have all bent a knee and bribed the President in one way or the other.
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
Not a sitting president and the NSA doesn't need a warrant for foreign targets.
That is correct. IIRC, FISA made that the law of the land since like the 1970s. However, Congress felt the need to provide retroactive immunity to the telcos who assisted in the FISA-violating wiretaps that the NSA demanded of them around the turn of the century. See Title II on printed page 32 of this [0] for more information, and check out newspaper coverage about the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008" around July, 2008.
This grant of retroactive immunity was particularly outrageous because it mooted in-progress civil suits against those telcos, which is not something that's supposed to be done at scale... especially for civil liberties violations.
That's a really odd thing to do if no law was violated, don't you think?
[0] <https://web.archive.org/web/20101207052813/http://frwebgate....>, found via following the chain of [1] -> [2] (because THOMAS is down today) -> [3]
[1] the July 9th, 2008 entry here: <https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline>
[2] <https://web.archive.org/web/20101209001911/http://thomas.loc...>
[3] The PDF here of version 4 of the bill, because archive.org doesn't have the text version archived. <https://web.archive.org/web/20101207012221/http://thomas.loc...>
https://apnews.com/article/business-china-asia-beijing-race-...
Please let’s not sanewash what is happening right now.
https://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/gm-ceo-resigns-at-oba...
Sen. Warren:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/embroiled-scandal-wells...
That was my original "norm" I stated. What has gotten more specific about that?
The president commands an enormous amount of power, and has an army of people who will do his bidding and simply adopt his opinions on any number of subjects. Shouting out to millions of his followers to state that the CEO of a private company is "CONFLICTED" and must resign is, by any definition, propaganda. Propaganda that changes the minds of the citizens of the country, riles up the base, and does nothing productive except to stoke anger and fear.
Working privately with this CEO, having a professional discussion with him, investigating the facts, determining that the best course of action for national security would be for him to step down, and maybe even putting some political pressure on that person to do so, and then publicly announcing the facts of what happened, is responsible governance.
It's genuinely an enormous difference.
And that happened as part of the government bailing GM out.
The Wells Fargo CEO presided over a major scandal involving customers being signed up for services they never agreed to.
What has the Intel CEO presided over during his short tenure that measures up to those?
In that Constitution story, a government website that has the Constitution's text was updated in a peculiar way. It could be interpreted as having been related to habeas corpus rights, as that was in the middle of the removal. It could also be interpreted as unintentional, as the deletion started in the middle of Article I Section 8. You'd think a targeted deletion wouldn't include so much unrelated text. Then again, you could say that it's just an incompetently done targeted deletion. It's debatable! Maybe it was intentional and maybe the order came from the top. Or maybe it was just a run of the mill tech SNAFU.
In this situation, Trump, on Trump's social media platform, posted that he wants this CEO to resign. That's not debatable, it's verifiable fact. It happened. We know the man at the top is saying this.
So yeah, stop with the false equivalencies and pay attention to what's actually happening.
If it doesn't affect them directly, or they can't perceive how it will affect them directly, they simply do not care.
If ever there were a case for the cost of lack of therapy, we are now witnessing it on a global, possibly catastrophic scale.
Just imagine if Hitler had been placed in charge of a superpower with our resources…
To be clear, we should not ignore the absolute reality that China and other powers are using every means available to influence global reality. But that is unrelated to the absurdity which we are now subject to.
The invisibility of Bush is the strongest indication that “the party of Reagan” is completely baffled and hiding from the monster that they and Rupert Murdoch created.
They're minus signs. The AI is evolving.
This is why we can’t have nice things.