Former President Donald Trump has called for the immediate resignation of Intel’s new chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, the veteran semiconductor industry leader whom the former president has described as being “highly conflicted.”

In a statement on his Truth Social network on Thursday, Trump wrote, “The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem.”

The one-paragraph statement provided no further detail on Tan’s alleged conflicts of interest, but Trump’s intervention comes just days after Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote to Intel board chair Frank Yeary to express his “concern about the security and integrity of Intel’s operations” over Tan’s extensive business connections with China.

As The Post reported, Cotton aimed Tan’s “extensive history as a prolific investor in Chinese technology companies,” including Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), which became China’s largest chipmaker after a past investment by Tan. The senator’s letter did not directly raise the export control breach at Cadence, but it did warn that Tan’s record made it difficult to take Intel’s position as America’s premier advanced chipmaker at face value.

Tan is a well-known and widely respected Silicon Valley veteran with decades of experience in semiconductors and venture capital. In addition to a venture firm based in San Francisco, he is linked to a pair of investment companies headquartered in Hong Kong that have directed hundreds of millions of dollars of capital into Chinese technology companies over the years.

Tan’s current and past business records have been thrown into sharper relief by his previous stint as CEO of California-based Cadence Design Systems, a semiconductor software company that disclosed last week that it violated U.S. export controls when it sold its chip design tools to a Chinese university that has connections to the Chinese military. That disclosure has intensified questions about Tan’s business relationships and whether his past could present an obstacle to his new role at the center of one of the world’s most important and high-stakes technology rivalries.

Intel, which has so far declined to comment on Trump’s post, has also not commented on the letter from Senator Cotton. But in pre-market trading in New York on Thursday morning, Intel’s shares fell by 3 percent in response to Trump’s comments.

Tan was named Intel’s CEO in March after the company’s board decided to replace his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, who was fired in December. Gelsinger was the last in a line of internal Intel executives who had risen through the company’s ranks to lead it. Tan, by contrast, is an outsider who has been brought in at a time when Intel is struggling to make up ground against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest and most advanced chipmaker.

Intel: ‘Bet the company’ on self-reliance

Intel remains the only major chipmaker headquartered in the United States and the last American company that is still able to produce its own advanced semiconductors. But Intel has also largely missed out on the artificial intelligence boom, which has dominated the current global chip race. Artificial intelligence or “AI” chips are those designed to power applications like large language models (LLMs), which are responsible for training AI.

In an effort to regain its competitive edge, Intel has received billions of dollars in government subsidies and low-interest loans. The government funding is part of a wider push in Washington to strengthen the U.S. domestic semiconductor industry and reduce America’s reliance on foreign chipmakers, particularly those in Taiwan and South Korea. But with Intel still far behind TSMC in terms of the most advanced manufacturing technology, Tan’s arrival has been met with high expectations.

In July, Tan warned that Intel could be forced to stop the development of its next-generation manufacturing technology if the company did not find a “significant external customer” to invest in it. If Intel abandons its most advanced technology, TSMC would hold a near monopoly in leading-edge chipmaking. The loss of that technology could also have national security implications.

That risk has so far coincided with Tan’s efforts to rein in spending and restore Intel to profitability. Tan’s actions have been cheered by some investors but have raised other questions about Intel’s direction.

In his letter to Yeary, Cotton emphasized that point, warning that Intel’s status as a major recipient of taxpayer-funded subsidies means that the company must operate at the highest levels of security compliance and corporate responsibility. “Intel is required to be a responsible steward of American taxpayer dollars and to comply with applicable security regulations,” Cotton wrote. “Mr Tan’s associations raise questions about Intel’s ability to fulfill these obligations.”

Intel’s board has yet to respond to Cotton’s letter, and neither the senator nor Trump has presented clear evidence for any of their allegations against Tan, other than a history of past investments. But with Tan’s long record of business and investment in Asia, both a potential strength and a potential vulnerability at Intel, the controversy over his appointment promises to complicate Intel’s efforts to focus on the task of overtaking TSMC.

In the meantime, for Trump, who has made technology and trade with China a central theme of his post-presidential political career, Tan’s background and business record apparently present a risk that cannot be allowed. Tan’s position at the helm of Intel now looks uncertain, and his future there will have major ramifications for the future of the U.S. semiconductor industry and America’s position in the emerging AI hardware arms race.