A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

(newsroom.intel.com)

89 points | by rntn 5 hours ago ago

99 comments

  • Alupis 4 hours ago ago

    Some context is available here: https://apnews.com/article/intel-trump-cotton-yeary-tan-2061...

    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.”

    • everfrustrated 2 hours ago ago

      If true, questions should also be raised about the Board who must have signed off on any conflicts of interest.

      • tlogan an hour ago ago

        > If true …

        I don’t know about his investments, but one fact is clear: he was CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which has just pleaded guilty to federal charges for exporting technology to China. That alone should make him ineligible to lead a company with major government contracts.

        If he resigns (and he will), the board should go with him.

        • everfrustrated 19 minutes ago ago

          If Tan resigns I suspect only way Pat would come back is with an entirely now board, so either way it's likely the board is done.

        • dangus an hour ago ago

          If I was an Intel shareholder I would be livid.

          Can you imagine the look you'd get if it was 1998 and you told me that AMD would have over twice the market capitalization of Intel in the next few decades? In 1998 Intel was 50x larger by market cap than AMD.

          It is a company that has been catastrophically mismanaged.

          • hedgehog 11 minutes ago ago

            Livid about the problem or livid that they're talking about axing the first CEO in decades that might have a shot at fixing the problems?

      • threatripper an hour ago 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 an hour ago ago

        This is entirely on the board. They didn’t know / They didn’t clear first with govt. Either way it’s grossly negligent.

    • cyanydeez an hour ago ago

      More important is the grifter in chiefs attack of the separation between corporations and government

  • tlogan an hour ago ago

    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.

  • parker-3461 4 hours ago ago
  • DiabloD3 4 hours ago ago

    This guy might be the last CEO of Intel.

    • soganess 42 minutes ago ago

      I don't really understand this.

      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.

      • tgma 3 minutes ago ago

        > 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.

        The current “bad chips that are only 10% behind” are fabbed by TSMC, not Intel.

      • chrsw 37 minutes ago ago

        "last CEO" is hyperbole. But despite the competitiveness of some of their latest offerings, their trajectory is beyond concerning.

      • threatripper 37 minutes ago ago

        In the past AMD needed to survive for antitrust reasons. Now x86 is losing in relevance now as alternatives are established. Nobody needs to keep intel alive.

        • deaddodo 7 minutes ago ago

          AMD also received many Hail Marys as a result of Intel’s anticompetitive behavior. Directly via payouts Intel and partners had to make, and indirectly via companies being more willing to work with them for their GPU expertise and better (out of desperation) licensing/purchase agreements.

          Intel can’t rely on the same. They haven’t been directly impacted by another larger company, they rely too much on a single technology that’s slowly fading from the spotlight, and they can’t compete against AMD on price.

          Maybe if they ended up in a small and lean desperation position they could pivot and survive, but their current business model is a losing eventuality.

  • sugarpimpdorsey an hour ago ago

    Well that was a whole lot of words that conveyed basically no information.

    A sort of corporate communications-whitewashed version of the My Cousin Vinny "Everything that guy just said is bullshit. Thank you."

  • mullingitover 35 minutes ago ago

    This regime is so corrupt that my immediate thought was that Tan had failed to pay the bribes that were demanded of him.

    Without question, he could still make this all go away by transferring ~100 million to the Trump family. That kind of brazen bribe has already happened, and doing it wouldn't make the first five pages of the NYT.

  • rpcope1 4 hours ago ago

    What are the odds this ends with Intel getting nationalized? I think it's really looking kind of non-zero now.

    • emchammer 4 hours ago 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 an hour ago 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 an hour ago 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 an hour ago ago

            Invading the US or Netherlands would not impact chip production. How are you not able to grasp that?

            • nerdsniper an hour ago ago

              Besides missing the point, this is a bad argument.

              ASML manufactures the machines that TSMC uses to produce chips - they have an even more critical and irreplaceable role in chip production than Taiwan does. ASML is headquartered in Veldhoven, NL. That would absolutely affect chip production - no new nodes, no replacement parts. There are other critical technologies for semiconductor manufacturing made in USA as well.

              • selimthegrim 17 minutes ago ago

                They are partially made in San Diego.

      • tengwar2 3 hours ago ago

        Partly home-made. Arm Holdings is British-based, but owned by Softbank Group (Japanese).

        • gdiamos 3 hours ago 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

          Eg https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-factory-foxconn...

          • deaddodo a few seconds ago ago

            ARM also produces core reference implementations. Most ARM licensees’ licenses only allow them to use those in a slightly modified form.

            What you’re talking about is ARM IP licenses, which allow the company to build their own implementation of the standard. Only a few companies have those and, of those, even fewer actually use it. Apple is one of those that does.

        • landl0rd 3 hours ago ago

          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 an hour ago 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.

        • OrvalWintermute 2 hours ago ago

          Japan is our ally.

          • linuxhansl 2 hours ago ago

            Not much longer if we continue as we do.

          • blooalien an hour ago ago

            We still have allies?

          • pphysch an hour ago ago

            More importantly, we militarily occupy Japan.

      • hinkley 3 hours ago ago

        Amd64 has other vendors.

      • scarface_74 3 hours ago 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 an hour ago ago

          The fact he allowed Tim Apple to just hang out there was telling

    • hn_throwaway_99 4 hours ago 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 an hour ago 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 4 hours ago 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.

    • tgma 6 minutes ago ago

      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.

    • tptacek 4 hours ago ago

      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 4 hours ago 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 3 hours ago ago

          Look up the Teddy Roosevelt era. Before his election and after he leaves.

        • morkalork 3 hours ago ago

          Lockheed's CEO Carl Kotchian resigned after political pressure but he brought it on himself.

        • bgwalter 4 hours ago ago
          • rco8786 4 hours ago ago

            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 4 hours ago ago

              The norm that’s been transgressed here is getting more and more specific, isn’t it?

              • rco8786 4 hours ago 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 3 hours ago ago

                  Publicly or privately, why is one fine and the other not?

                  • rco8786 3 hours ago 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 3 hours ago 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 3 hours ago 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.

            • bgwalter 38 minutes ago ago

              The CEO will likely be fine, Trump also announces movements of nuclear submarines on Truth Social.

              I'd be more concerned about non-public dealings that Trump might have learned from Roy Cohn, but these are probably off limits for discussion here. In general, what is on Truth Social does not matter.

          • sjsdaiuasgdia 3 hours ago 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 3 hours ago 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 3 hours ago ago

                Oh, so not the same kind of thing at all then...

                • tptacek 3 hours ago ago

                  You'll notice that none of the examples on this thread are the same things.

                  • sjsdaiuasgdia 3 hours ago ago

                    Yeah, it seems like a lot of hot air to prop up a false equivalency.

                    • tptacek 3 hours ago ago

                      I suggest not asking questions you don't want the answers to.

                      • antonvs an hour ago ago

                        People are interested in valid answers, not gaslighting.

                      • sjsdaiuasgdia 3 hours ago ago

                        I suggest not normalizing Trump's behaviors by creating false equivalencies.

                        • tptacek 3 hours ago 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 3 hours ago 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 2 hours ago 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.

                              • CamperBob2 an hour ago ago

                                Dude, he altered a weather map with a Sharpie on live TV.

                                • tptacek 26 minutes ago ago

                                  The theory behind this Constitution thing is as if, after altering the weather map, the weather changed.

                                  • CamperBob2 9 minutes ago ago

                                    Well, it would have if he had been allowed to use nuclear weapons on the hurricane instead of just a Sharpie.

                              • fzeroracer an hour ago 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.

                                • tptacek 27 minutes ago ago

                                  It's exactly because I think this is the most dangerous President in American history that I find these kinds of claims so risible and worth knocking down.

    • fundad 3 hours ago ago

      They may have dropped the name China Initiative but all this tough talk on China (and immigration) primes the public to believe the worst.

      https://apnews.com/article/business-china-asia-beijing-race-...

    • gibbitz 3 hours ago 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 3 hours ago 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 3 hours ago 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.

    • cnst 3 hours ago ago
  • michaelteter 4 hours ago 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 3 hours ago ago

      Therapists don’t know how to fix narcissists. And narcissists don’t want to be fixed.

  • rwmj 4 hours ago 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 4 hours ago ago

      He’s the CEO of a multi billion dollar company of course he has a comms team.

  • gjvc 3 hours ago ago

    who buys intel instead of AMD at this point?

    • ac29 11 minutes ago ago

      A lot of people?

      Intel, even in its current weakened state, did nearly double the revenue of AMD last quarter.

    • extraduder_ire an hour ago ago

      It can't be AMD, two separate companies need to exist for dual-sourcing reasons. Market cap is $86.5B ATM, so there's quite a few who could afford them.

    • bornfreddy 2 hours ago ago

      Swing traders. Also those who think China-Taiwan conflict is imminent.

    • nodesocket an hour ago ago

      I own both, though admittedly Intel has not panned out so far.

  • getnormality 4 hours ago ago

    Lots of en dashes.

    • xdennis 4 hours ago 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.

      • hinkley 3 hours ago 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 2 hours ago ago

          I love semicolons and dashes. AI won't take them from me!

      • threatripper an hour ago ago

        Must be a force of habit.

  • dlyco an hour ago 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.

  • wewewedxfgdf an hour ago ago

    The biggest problem with Lip Bu Tan is he has given up on competing with Nvidia.

    What's the point of being Intel CEO if you give up?

    He should resign.

    • newAccount2025 33 minutes ago ago

      Can they win?

      • nont 8 minutes ago ago

        That is not as important as if they want to win.