Intel shares jumped more than 10% after the U.S.’s most prominent chipmaker appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new boss.
Tan is an industry veteran, having served as CEO of Cadence Design Systems, the chip design software powerhouse, for more than a decade.
He has a big job ahead of him when he takes over the ailing semiconductor giant on March 18. Tan will need to turn around the fortunes of a company that may need a “radical shake-up.”
Intel’s shares have lost over half their value over the past 12 months. For decades, Intel designed and manufactured its own chips in-house, but it soon lost ground to competitors focused on either chip design or manufacturing. Previous CEO Pat Gelsinger launched an expensive foundry business in a bid to capture market share from leader TSMC.
Tan is the latest in a long line of non-U.S.-born executives taking over the country’s leading chip firms.
He was born in Muar, in the Malaysian state of Johor, and grew up in Singapore. He studied physics in Nanyang University (which later became part of the National University of Singapore), before moving to the U.S. to get a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981.
Tan, a naturalized U.S. citizen, then spent decades in the U.S. in a career that spanned both venture capital and tech, including a brief stint as a board member of Intel. (He quit in mid-2024, reportedly due to differences with Gelsinger’s strategy.)
Broadcom
But Intel’s incoming CEO won’t be the only leading Fortune 500 chip CEO with roots in Malaysia.
Broadcom, another darling of the recent AI-driven boom and No. 118 on the Fortune 500, also has a Malaysia born CEO.
Hock E. Tan (no relation to Intel’s incoming CEO) was born in Penang, now a semiconductor hub in Southeast Asia. He’s served as CEO at Broadcom since 2006, helping to transform Broadcom from a semiconductor company into a leading infrastructure technology company. Broadcom serves markets like data centers and cybersecurity.
Hock Tan has also diversified Broadcom’s business through acquisitions, such as its 2023 purchase of VMWare, a cloud computing firm, in a deal valued at $69 billion.
Broadcom’s shares are up 54% over the past year, outpacing Nvidia’s growth over the same period.
The company has also been linked to discussions about Intel’s future. Broadcom has reportedly expressed interest in Intel’s chip design business. And this week, Reuters reported that TSMC has approached Broadcom to join a consortium, alongside Nvidia and AMD, to take over Intel’s foundries.
Nvidia and AMD
Arguably the most prominent executive of the AI boom, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was born in Taiwan. He founded Nvidia in 1993, after getting a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford and jobs at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices.
Nvidia’s GPUs drove growth in the PC gaming market in the early 2000s. Nvidia’s processors are now also key to the AI boom, which has helped grow the chipmaker into one of the world’s most valuable companies. It’s currently No. 65 on the Fortune 500, eight years after debuting in 2017.
Fellow Taiwan-born Lisa Su leads fellow Fortune 500 chip designer AMD, taking over as CEO in 2014. She first joined the company in 2012. AMD is No. 181 on the Fortune 500.
Su moved to the U.S. when she was three years old. She has a bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, and previously worked at Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale Semiconductor before moving to AMD.
Super Micro Computer
Super Micro Computer, one of the most recent entries on the Fortune 500, is also led by a CEO from Taiwan. In 1993, Charles Liang founded Super Micro, which provides servers and storage solutions for data centers and cloud computing businesses.
The company’s rise has mirrored surging demand for AI. Super Micro debuted on the Fortune 500 last year with an annual revenue of $7.1 billion, enough to put it at No. 498.
Still, the company’s rapid rise has come with growing pains. Short seller Hindenburg Research targeted Super Micro last August; the company then delayed filing audited financial reports, sending stocks into a tailspin. Super Micro belatedly filed its financial reports in late February.
Micron
Another one of the U.S.’s leading chipmakers—Micron Technology, No. 264 on the Fortune 500—is led by Sanjay Mehrotra, born in India. Mehrotra moved to the U.S. to attend higher education at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mehrotra co-founded SanDisk, another U.S. memory chip firm, in 1988. He took over as CEO in 2011, leading the company until its acquisition by Western Digital in 2016. He took over Micron, headquartered in the U.S. state of Idaho, a year later.
He holds more than 70 patents in the memory space, according to his official company profile.
Micron has also been a beneficiary of the AI boom as its only one of a handful of memory chipmakers that mass produces high-bandwidth memory chips (HBMs), which are key for running complex AI models efficiently. The other two prominent HBM producers are South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung.
