'You're Fired!': Trump Tells Intel Boss To Resign Over China Ties

Latest stories

Taiwan's future precarious-with or without US-China conflict

Mysterious Chinese stealth jet a fresh test for US air dominance

US-Korea alliance in the shadow of Trump's transactionalism

His father was the chief writer of Nanyang Siang Pau, and his mother was a dormitory warden at Nanyang University (now Nanyang Technological University) in Singapore.

Tan was admitted to the Department of Physics at Nanyang University at the age of 16. After studying nuclear engineering at America's elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he pursued a degree in business administration at the University of San Francisco.

In 1987, he founded Walden International with an initial management fund of $3 million, focusing on early-stage technology investments.

According to Chinese media, Walden International began investing in Chinese startups in 1994, starting with Little Swan, a washing machine manufacturer, and subsequently investing in numerous other companies, including Sina, Skyworth, DJI, Meituan and Mindray.

In 2000, Walden International financed Taiwanese entrepreneur Zhang Rujing in founding the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC).

“Over the past 20 years, every time SMIC overcame adversity and achieved every process breakthrough, Walden International has been with SMIC, standing by it through thick and thin and providing its full support,” Tan says in an article when SMIC went public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market in July 2020.

He praised SMIC for having advanced its products from 250 nanometers to 14 nm within two decades.

He also said Walden International had invested in more than 500 companies globally, including 120 semiconductor firms. Among these, 110 companies went public.

In 2009, he set up Sakarya Limited and Seine Limited in Hong Kong to manage his investments in China. In 2011, Walden International, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Shanghai government established Shanghai Huaxin Venture Capital Enterprise , one of the first funds in China dedicated to the country's semiconductor industry.

“I am an overseas Chinese and have always had a Chinese complex,” he told Jiemian in an interview in 2018.“Although Cadence is an American company, within the scope allowed by the US government, we will help domestic [Chinese] companies in tools and intellectual property as much as possible.”

In April 2025, Reuters reported that Tan controls more than 40 Chinese companies and funds, and has minority stakes in over 600 via his investment firms.

Cadence's case

While investing in China, Tan joined Cadence's board in 2004 and was the company's Chief Executive from 2009 to 2021.

At the CDNLive 2018 conference, Xia Yu, director of Huawei HiSilicon Platform and Key Technology Development Department, complained about the slow development of Cadence's Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) software.

“We like to work with customers like HiSilicon. They run fast themselves, and they push us to run fast too,” Tan said.

At that time, Trump, in his first term, had not yet sanctioned Huawei Technologies, HiSilicon, and SMIC. Chinese fabless chipmakers could freely order chips from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

On July 28, the US Justice Department announced that Cadence agreed to plead guilty and pay over $140 million in fines for unlawfully selling EDA hardware, software, and semiconductor design intellectual property (IP) technology to the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT).

NUDT, a university under the leadership of the People's Republic of China (PRC)'s Central Military Commission, was added to the US Commerce Department's Entity List in February 2015 due to its use of US-origin components to produce supercomputers believed to support nuclear explosive simulation and military simulation activities in the PRC.