Comment by Riaz Haq on August 8, 2025 at 10:16am

How Intel’s CEO Helped Create China’s Chip Industry - The Wall Street Journal.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-intels-ceo-helped-create-chinas-chip-i...

Over four decades and hundreds of investments, Tan’s U.S.-based venture-capital firm, Walden International, supported some of the biggest names in China’s chip industry. The list includes China’s leading chip manufacturer as well as smaller companies that filled essential niche roles.

At the time, most of the firm’s investments weren’t controversial, and many Silicon Valley venture capitalists and U.S. university endowments joined Tan in pouring billions of dollars into China.

With U.S.-China tensions now high, those investments no longer look so benign. Under both presidents Biden and Trump, Washington has restricted chip exports and chip-making equipment to China, fearing the military implications of Beijing’s technological advances.

In a statement, Tan said he shared the president’s “commitment to advancing U.S. national and economic security” and that Intel was working with the Trump administration “to address the matters that have been raised and ensure they have the facts.” He added that the U.S. has been his home for more than 40 years: “I love this country,” he said.

Tan was born in what is now Malaysia and raised in Singapore, where most of the population, like Tan, is of Chinese ancestry. The avid basketball player got a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a second master’s in business from the University of San Francisco. Now 65, he is a naturalized American.

Tan founded the San Francisco-based venture-capital firm Walden International in 1987 with the aim, he said decades later, of becoming “the pride of overseas Chinese.” Its name was inspired by the Henry David Thoreau book “Walden,” which championed simple living, self-sufficiency and contrarian thinking.

“I said, ‘I want to be an impact player and what can I offer?’ ” Tan recalled in a 2007 presentation at the University of California, Berkeley. He concluded that his background positioned him to bring U.S. investors to Asia and help Asian companies expand abroad.

In 1993, Chinese officials invited Walden to introduce the concept of venture capital to the Communist Party-run country, a company promotion video said. A year later, Walden established a China-focused fund.

Early investments went to both state-owned companies and China’s swelling class of entrepreneurs. At one point, it was the biggest shareholder in Sina, parent of Weibo , the Chinese social-media equivalent of X. “It is fair to say there would be no Sina today without Walden,” Sina’s chairman once said.

Tan’s impact was most profound in semiconductors. China remains behind its Asian rivals and the U.S. in major chip technologies, and while Intel’s principal competitors aren’t Chinese, they are catching up fast.

Walden was an early investor in SMIC, the company trying to become China’s answer to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , the widely recognized global leader in making cutting-edge chips. Although it still trails TSMC, SMIC is now China’s biggest chip maker.

Tan served on SMIC’s board of directors for at least 18 years. When the company went public on a Chinese exchange in 2020, Tan said that “Walden has stood alongside SMIC all the way” and supported its manufacturing breakthroughs.

Later that year, the Commerce Department took action to block SMIC from further breakthroughs and put it on a list restricting U.S. suppliers from selling equipment to the Shanghai-based company.

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