Over the summer, the chip maker Intel made an offer to buy Rivos, a start-up that designs artificial intelligence chips.
Intel’s bid, described by two people with knowledge of the talks, was part of a sale process by Rivos, which was eventually snapped up by Meta in October. What Meta paid to buy Rivos was not disclosed, but the start-up was valued at around $2 billion at the time.
What stands out from the deal is one of its beneficiaries: Lip-Bu Tan, the chief executive of Intel.
Mr. Tan, 66, who was appointed the top executive of Intel in March, works simultaneously as a tech investor. Since 1987, he has led a venture capital firm called Walden International that has put money into more than 500 companies. In 2013, he helped establish a different venture firm, Celesta Capital, and another in 2021 called Walden Catalyst. One start-up that Walden Catalyst backed was Rivos, for which Mr. Tan served as the founding chairman.
“Very proud” that Rivos was bought by Meta, Mr. Tan wrote on LinkedIn after the deal. He did not participate in Intel’s negotiations with Rivos, one person familiar with the talks said, but stood to profit handsomely from the sale to Meta.
The transaction is an example of how Mr. Tan’s roles at Intel and as a tech investor have overlapped. Intel recently held talks to buy the A.I. chip maker SambaNova Systems, where Mr. Tan serves as the executive chairman and as an investor, people with knowledge of the situation said. And he has talked about SambaNova’s offerings when meeting with at least one major Intel customer, Dell, two of the people said.
Mr. Tan’s multiple jobs have caused consternation in the chip industry and inside Intel, according to interviews with more than a dozen people with knowledge of the company who were not authorized to speak publicly. Four recently departed Intel employees said that what they viewed as Mr. Tan’s conflicts of interest contributed to their decisions to leave.
How Intel is led has become an issue for American taxpayers too, since the U.S. government in August acquired a 10 percent stake in the struggling company for $8.9 billion.
“Given that Intel is in dire straits, one would expect its C.E.O. to be totally dedicated and focused on returning the company to surviving and thriving,” said Robert Burgelman, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who considers the company’s business challenges more important than questions about conflicts of interest.
Mr. Tan declined to comment. An Intel spokesman said its board of directors had carefully considered issues surrounding Mr. Tan’s investments, and that its members ensure he abides by “rigorous and uncompromising governance and conflict policies.” The board believed it was important that Intel “fully leverage” Mr. Tan’s network to “capture the next wave of industry innovation and opportunity,” the spokesman added.
SambaNova declined to comment. Its talks with Intel were earlier reported by Bloomberg.
Several former Intel executives said they were surprised that the company’s board did not require Mr. Tan to place chip investments in a blind trust to reduce potential conflicts when he was hired. The board asked Mr. Tan to restrict the number of board seats he held in start-ups and to comply with rules that required Intel to annually disclose significant transactions involving his personal investments.
These measures do not prevent Mr. Tan from helping to identify acquisition targets or discussing nonfinancial aspects of a transaction. But he must recuse himself from negotiating the price of any transaction, which the Intel board’s audit committee must review for fairness and the company’s best interests.
As long as these procedures are followed, there is nothing illegal or improper about Mr. Tan making money if Intel buys one of his companies, said Joseph Grundfest, a Stanford Law School professor who studies corporate governance.
“Lip-Bu has had a finger in nearly every hardware and software pie for decades,” said Reed Hundt, a former Intel director. “This can be a huge advantage for Intel rather than a conflicts problem, provided that the board fulfills its responsibility for approving important transactions.”
Yet, Mr. Tan’s start-up investments have caused him trouble before. In 2023, a congressional committee focused on China wrote him a letter criticizing Walden for making more than a third of its investments there. That included investments in companies that were on a U.S. blacklist for helping Beijing surveil Uyghurs, an ethnic minority in China’s far western region of Xinjiang.
An Intel spokeswoman said Mr. Tan had sold stakes in some of those companies before taking over Intel.
Even so, President Trump in August said Mr. Tan was “highly conflicted” because of his investments in China and called on him to resign from Intel. Mr. Trump backed off that criticism after he met Mr. Tan that month. Mr. Tan agreed the United States could invest in Intel, which the president called “a great deal.”
Mr. Tan has served as both the chief executive of a public company and an investor before. He led a turnaround at Cadence Design Systems, a maker of software for designing chips, as its chief executive from 2008 to 2021. While running Cadence, he continued investing and serving on corporate boards, citing a willingness to work long hours.
“I only need four, five hours of sleep,” Mr. Tan said in an oral history conducted in 2018 by the Computer History Museum.
Mr. Tan joined Intel’s board in 2022 and served until 2024 before being appointed to lead the beleaguered company this year. At the time, Intel’s board discussed Mr. Tan’s investments and how to avoid potential conflicts, a person familiar with those deliberations said.
To turn around Intel, Mr. Tan has slashed tens of thousands of jobs, hired new managers, vowed to better listen to customers and struck the deal with the Trump administration for a stake in the company.
All the while, he has continued making start-up investments. He has frequently celebrated his start-ups’ achievements in LinkedIn posts.
“I am proud to be investor and serve on the board for great journey together,” Mr. Tan, who was born in Malaysia, wrote this month about Celestial AI, a networking technology start-up that was purchased for $3.25 billion by Marvell Technology.
In April, Mr. Tan told Wall Street analysts that he had canceled a plan to spin off Intel’s venture capital arm, Intel Capital. He later took a more direct role in overseeing its activities, a person with knowledge of the change said. Intel Capital has at times invested in the same companies that Mr. Tan has invested in, including Rivos and SambaNova.
Mr. Tan also talked about SambaNova’s offerings in an Intel meeting with Dell in recent months, two people familiar with the matter said. A Dell spokesman said its conversations with Intel were “focused on driving business for both companies.” Intel declined to comment on the meeting.
Mr. Tan’s focus on his start-ups is applauded among entrepreneurs. “He’s in my board meeting and it’s like the most important thing on the planet,” said Krishna Rangasayee, the chief executive of SiMa Technologies, an A.I. chip maker where Mr. Tan serves as a director.
At Rivos, Mr. Tan took a central role, according to a blog post from Walden Catalyst after Meta bought the start-up. He came up with the idea of the start-up in 2021. It is centered on RISC-V, a technology for building microprocessor chips that is widely shared without paying royalties.
Rivos faced a lawsuit from Apple over alleged intellectual property theft in 2022, which Mr. Tan helped settle last year. He also convinced Rivos to shift to making A.I. chips rather than general-purpose microprocessors, a direction bolstered by a partnership with Meta.
As Rivos tried raising new funds this year, it received several acquisition offers that led to the winning Meta bid.
“I am deeply grateful for Lip-Bu’s leadership and unwavering guidance,” said Puneet Kumar, the co-founder and chief executive of Rivos, in the Walden Catalyst blog post about the start-up’s history.
Meta declined to comment beyond a LinkedIn post, which said the Rivos team should help accelerate its efforts to develop better A.I. chips.
“The journey was far from easy,” Mr. Tan wrote in his LinkedIn post about Rivos, in which he recounted the company’s challenges and praised its resilience. “I encouraged a pivot to A.I. workloads and a closer partnership with Meta, which changed the company trajectory.”
Tripp Mickle reports on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about trends across the tech industry like layoffs and artificial intelligence.
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