Key points
- Intel's Lip-Bu Tan sizes up China's chips
- What Tan says about Washington's Intel stake
- Why Tan calls Chinese AI models "good enough"
Intel (INTC) chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said Chinese chips are not far behind U.S. technology, according to Nikkei Asia's summary of an exclusive interview published Oct. 16. The publicly available summary does not specify which chips or performance measures he was discussing.
In the interview, Tan also said the Trump administration has no policy of using its minority stake in Intel to interfere with the company's business strategy.
The government's stake in Intel
The U.S. government agreed in August 2025 to buy 433.3 million Intel shares at $20.47 each, representing about 9.9% at the time. The $8.9 billion investment was funded with CHIPS Act grants Intel hadn't yet received and money from the Secure Enclave program. Intel said at the time that the government's ownership would be passive, with no board seat.
SoftBank bought $2 billion of Intel stock the same month, and Nvidia (NVDA) has also taken a stake.
Tan's ties to China have drawn scrutiny before. In August 2025, President Trump called on Tan to resign over his past investments in Chinese companies, then reversed course after meeting him at the White House.
Tan on Chinese AI models
On Oct. 12, Tan spoke at a panel hosted by DBS in Singapore, the same conference where Broadcom's Hock Tan named capital as AI's biggest constraint. There, he said adoption of Chinese frontier AI models has been "very fast" and that their token costs are lower, according to Reuters.
He called the performance of Chinese models such as DeepSeek, Kimi, and GLM "good enough" and said the market will decide which models fit which uses. "I'm a strong believer of open source, that's the best way to drive efficiency," Tan said.
