Lip-Bu Tan is a powerful technology executive, though many have never heard of him. Now, he is stepping into the high-profile job of CEO at Intel, a troubled but storied chipmaker. His performance will be closely watched.
Tan was named Intel CEO on Wednesday. He faces the enormous challenge of turning around the company that put the “silicon” in Silicon Valley.
While the public may not know him, Intel’s former and potential customers are familiar with Tan. Virtually everyone has done business with him, either buying one of the startups he backed or using software from a company he ran.
Tan interacts with prominent figures like Lisa Su from AMD and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, both AI chip leaders. According to Reuters reports, they were pitched to invest in Intel. His efforts are also likely to be closely watched by U.S. President Donald Trump, who wants Intel to rebound.
“Tan can leverage his experience and especially his industry connections, while also pursuing excellence within Intel,” said independent analyst Jack Gold. “Hopefully the board will stay out of his way as he makes needed changes.”
To turn around the semiconductor industry’s largest ship, Tan, 65, may use underdog strategies. These strategies helped him transform smaller companies that later became big.
Born in Malaysia, raised in Singapore, and now an American citizen, Tan came to the U.S. for his advanced education, studying nuclear engineering at MIT. He then moved to California for business school and founded Walden International in 1987. Named after Thoreau’s pond, the firm made unconventional bets.
Tan believed small teams of startup engineers with good chip design ideas could successfully compete against established chip giants. He poured money into hundreds of startups. For instance, he invested in Annapurna Labs, later bought by Amazon.com for $370 million, which became the heart of its in-house chip division. Amazon now deploys more of its own central processors than it does those from Intel.
He also invested in Nuvia, which Qualcomm bought for $1.4 billion in 2021, making it a core part of their push to compete with Intel in the laptop and PC chip markets.
Tan remains actively involved with startups. They could either become competitors or acquisition targets for Intel.
For example, earlier this week he invested in AI photonic startup Celestial AI. It is backed by Intel rival AMD.
Both as an investor and CEO, Tan recognized a major trend early on. This trend has swept the chip industry over the past 30 years: designing chips and manufacturing them would split into two different specialties.
Tan was CEO of Cadence Design Systems from 2009 to 2021. He revived the chip design software firm’s fortunes. Tan focused Cadence on supplying the software for sophisticated designs and partnered closely with TSMC. From its founding days, TSMC swore it would focus only on manufacturing.
Over Tan’s time at Cadence, the firm’s stock appreciated 3,200%. The company landed Apple as one of its largest customers as the iPhone maker shifted away from suppliers such as Intel and toward its own chips.
Cadence’s tools also became central to chip industry firms such as Broadcom. Broadcom helps Google, Amazon, and others design their own AI chips and have them made by TSMC.
“He did a really good job of pointing (Cadence) in the right direction,” said Karl Freund, analyst with Cambrian AI Research. “Cadence really aligned themselves with TSMC – they saw them as a leader and the go-to shop.”
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