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AsianFin -- With Intel's appointment of Lip-Bu Tan as CEO, all four of Silicon Valley's semiconductor giants—Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom—are now led by executives of Chinese descent.
Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, CEOs of Nvidia and AMD, respectively, were born in Taiwan, while Lip-Bu Tan and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan hail from Malaysia.
Tan, who was named Intel's new CEO on March 12, was born into a Chinese family in Malaysia and raised in Singapore. After earning a physics degree from Nanyang Technological University, he moved to the U.S. in 1978 to pursue a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Tan steps in as Intel's new leader during a time of significant challenges, taking over from outgoing CEO Pat Gelsinger.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang,62, lives in America, and he co-founded a company that produced graphics for the gaming industry in 1993 that evolved into the AI chip giant.
Huang was born in Tainan City, Taiwan, and moved to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and later obtained a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Huang’s startup Nvidia had a humble beginning of developing Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The company's GeForce series of GPU products achieved a tremendous success in the fields of electronic gaming, blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI), establishing Nvidia as one of the world's leading technology companies.
In 2015, Nvidia officially entered the deep learning domain. With the advent of OpenAI that uses Nvidia’s chips and the global surge in AI, Nvidia's stock price soared.
By 2024, driven by the increasing demand for GPUs due to the AI wave, Nvidia became the world's largest company by market capitalization. Consequently, Jensen Huang became the 10th richest person globally, with a net worth exceeding $100 billion.
AMD's CEO Lisa Su, 56, also hails from Taiwan's Tainan region like Huang, moved to the U.S. at the age of three, later graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a doctoral degree in electrical engineering in 1994.
Su began her career at Texas Instruments. In 1995, she transitioned to the research and development division of International Business Machines (IBM), where she later served as the head of IBM's R&D department and as a special assistant to the CEO.
In 2007, she was appointed Chief Technology Officer at Freescale Semiconductor and subsequently held the positions of Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Networking and Multimedia Division.
Su joined AMD in January 2012, taking on roles such as Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Business. In 2014, she became the first female CEO in AMD's history.
Under her leadership, AMD turned its financial losses into profits and successfully transformed into a leading company in high-performance and adaptive computing, as well as one of the fastest-growing semiconductor companies globally.
Currently, AMD is also intensifying its efforts in the AI chip sector, becoming a significant player in the GPU field. In October 2024, AMD released the Instinct MI355X accelerator card, positioning it as a competitor to Nvidia's most powerful AI chip.
AMD Instinct MI350 series accelerators are expected to hit the market in the second half of 2025.
Broadcom's CEO Hock Tan 72, is a Malaysian-born Chinese American executive. He received a scholarship to study at MIT in 1971. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 1975 and earned a master's degree in the same subject later. Tan also holds a MBA degree from Harvard University. He was the highest-paid CEO in the U.S. in 2017, pocketing US$103.2 million that year. In 2023, Tan's total compensation from Broadcom was $161.8 million, up 167% from the previous year, making Tan the third highest paid CEO in the U.S. that year.
From 2005 to 2008, Hock Tan served as the Chairman of the Board at Integrated Device Technology. Prior to becoming the Chairman of IDT, he held the positions of President and Chief Executive Officer at Integrated Circuit Systems from 1999 to 2005.
From 1992 to 1994, he served as the Vice President of Finance at Commodore International and had also held senior management roles in finance at PepsiCo and General Motors.
Between 1988 and 1992, he served as the Managing Director of Pacven Investment, a Singapore-based venture capital fund institution, and from 1983 to 1988, he served as the Managing Director of Hume Industries in Malaysia.
Hock Tan has also been a board member of Meta since February 2024. In 2024, he was awarded the highest honor, the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award, by the Global Semiconductor Alliance.
From Huang revolutionizing AI computing with GPUs to Su leading AMD's resurgence and Hock Tan expanding Broadcom through strategic acquisitions, these executives have shattered Silicon Valley's "glass ceiling," reflecting the shifting power dynamics of the global technology industry.
The increasing presence of business leaders of Chinese descent at the heart of Silicon Valley is, at its core, a testament to how globalization has transformed immigrant talents into key industry players.
Their backgrounds—the upbringing of Huang and Su in Taiwan and that of Lip-Bu Tan and Hock Tan in Malaysia, and their collective experience at top U.S. universities—have enabled them to thrive in Silicon Valley while leveraging a unique cross-cultural advantage.
Their competitive advantage in leadership is particularly evident in two areas: technological foresight and geopolitical insight.
Each of these executives has spent decades immersed in Silicon Valley's innovation ecosystem, developing an acute sense for emerging technologies and their commercialization.
Huang, for instance, anticipated the growing demand for AI computing as early as 2006, laying the foundation for Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem. This strategic vision stems from his deep grasp of technological trends. Meanwhile, as executives with strong ties to Asia, they possess a natural edge in global supply chain management and market expansion.
Lip-Bu Tan, as a director on the board of China's SMIC for 16 years, played an integral part for the firm’s listing on the STAR Market in July 2020, which could serve as a strategic asset for Intel's expansion into emerging markets.
The rise of Chinese-origin CEOs coincides with a generational shift in the semiconductor industry. Under the helm of Huang, Nvidia's dominance in GPUs represents an innovative response to the limits of Moore's Law.
As traditional CPU performance gains slowed, Nvidia pioneered parallel computing architectures, an approach that aligns closely with the system-level innovation mindset common among Chinese engineers.
Similarly, under Su's leadership, AMD's Zen architecture marked a major leap in x86 processor performance, driven by her deep understanding of the ecosystem and continuous iteration. This blend of technical expertise and ecosystem transformation exemplifies the engineering culture and business acumen that define her leadership.
Lip-Bu Tan's appointment carries huge significance. A key figure in the semiconductor industry, he previously spearheaded the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) revolution at Cadence and played a role in China's semiconductor sector through his venture capital firm, Walden International.
His leadership at Intel signals a shift from aggressive expansion toward an "engineering-centric" approach. Under Lip-Bu Tan's tenure at Cadence, the company's stock price surged 32-fold, underscoring the synergy between deep technical expertise and strong business execution.
For the past two decades, Indian-origin executives have dominated Silicon Valley's corporate leadership, heading companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe in what has been dubbed the "Bangalore Phenomenon."
While Indian leaders have undoubtedly driven record-breaking growth at companies like Google and Microsoft, the increasing influence of executives of Chinese origin suggests a new wave of leadership in Silicon Valley.
As more Chinese-origin leaders enter the U.S. tech industry's inner circle, they are poised to shape the future of some of the world's most powerful companies, ushering in a new era of technological and business leadership.
