Intel shares were under pressure Thursday after President Donald Trump called for the chipmaker’s CEO to resign immediately.

In a Truth Social post, Trump said Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan “is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem.” Intel dropped in the premarket on the back of that post, last trading 5% lower.

Tan was named as Intel CEO in March. This week, U.S. Republican Senator Tom Cotton questioned his ties to Chinese companies and referenced a past criminal case involving Cadence Design, where Tan was CEO until 2021, Reuters reported.

Cotton wrote to Intel’s chair to “express concern about the security and integrity of Intel’s operations and its potential impact on U.S. national security,” Reuters said.

After months of speculation, U.S. President Donald Trump has divulged more of his semiconductor tariff plans, but his latest threats might raise more questions than answers. 

On Wednesday, Trump said he will impose a 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, but not for companies that are “building in the United States.”

As semiconductors represent an over $600 billion industry at the heart of the modern digital economy, any potential tariffs hold massive weight. 

However, experts say the President has yet to provide key details on the policy, which will ultimately determine their full impact and targets. 

“It’s still too early to pin down the impact of the tariffs on the semiconductor sector,”  Ray Wang, research director of semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at The Futurum Group, told CNBC. 

“The final rule is likely still being drafted and the technical details are far from clear at this point.” 

The U.S. has been working to onshore its semiconductor supply chain for many years now. Since 2020, the world’s largest semiconductor companies such as TSMC and Samsung Electronics have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building plants in the U.S.

Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday, James Sullivan, Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific Equity Research at J.P. Morgan, said this could mean most major chip manufacturers receiving exemptions.

If this is the case, the policy could have the effect of “continuing to consolidate market share amongst the largest cap players in the space,” Sullivan said. 

Indeed, shares of major Asian chip companies like TSMC, which has significant investments in the U.S., rose in Thursday morning trading following Trump’s announcement. Early this year, TSMC announced it would expand its investments in the U.S. to $165 billion. 

Shares of South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix — which have also invested in the U.S. — were also trading up after a Korean trade envoy reportedly said on radio that the duo would be exempt from the 100% tariffs.

For example, in 2024, the U.S. imported $46.3 billion of semiconductors — only about 1% of all U.S. imports, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

While Rasgon said tariffs on these imports may be manageable, broader tariffs would be harder to deal with. 

“What we don’t know with [Trump’s] comments on tariffs, is it just raw semiconductors? Are there going to be tariffs on end devices? Are you going to be looking at tariffs on components within end devices?,” Rasgon asked. 

The confusion and questions around semiconductor tariffs were brought to the forefront after the U.S. Department of Commerce started a national security investigation of semiconductor imports in April, just as the sector was exempted from Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs.

The vague language from the Trump administration — though not invoked in the president’s latest proclamations — could theoretically be used to apply broad tariffs to an enormous segment of the electronics supply chain. It’s also unclear on the extent that semiconductor materials and manufacturing equipment used to manufacture chips would fall under the tariffs. 

Another large buyer of semiconductors in the U.S. are cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services and Google, which are essential to power Washington’s AI plans. 

According to a recent report from ITIF, semiconductors contribute $7 trillion in global economic activity annually by underpinning a range of downstream applications including AI and “big data.”

In a potential sign of American companies seeking to move their chip supply chains into the U.S., Apple CEO Tim Cook, alongside Trump at the White house Wednesday, announced that it will be supplied chips from Samsung’s production plant in Texas. 

The company also announced an additional $100 billion in U.S. investments, raising its total investment commitments in the country to $600 billion over the next four years.

SoftBank Group on Thursday reported fiscal first-quarter profit that topped expectations, driven by gains in its Vision Fund tech investment arm.

The Japanese giant reported 421.8 billion yen ($2.87 billion) in the quarter ended June, versus 127.6 billion yen expected, according to LSEG consensus estimates. It is the second straight quarter of profit for SoftBank. The company reported a 174.28 billion yen loss in the same period last year.

In the fiscal first quarter, SoftBank said the value of its Vision Funds rose $4.8 billion. Profit for the Vision Funds segment, which takes into account other factors like expenses, hit 451.4 billion yen in the quarter, versus a loss in the same period last year.

SoftBank has been on spending spree related to AI. The Japanese giant is leading a $40 billion funding round into ChatGPT developer OpenAI and it is currently waiting for its $6.5 proposed acquisition of AI chip firm Ampere Computing to close.

The Vision Fund performance will be welcomed by investors hoping to see those big AI bets start to pay off.

SoftBank said that the rise of the value of the Vision Fund was helped by gains at public companies such as ride-hailing firm Grab, as well as Indian food delivery firm Swiggy. The performance was also aided by private investments in some of firms in India in which the fund has a position.

Meanwhile, SoftBank is a key company in the massive $500 billion Stargate project in the U.S. that aims to build data centers and AI infrastructure in the country. Investors are waiting for details on how SoftBank plans to fund this spending.

In May, SoftBank posted its first annual profit in four years for the fiscal year ended March, helped by gains in SoftBank’s older investments in Alibaba, T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom.

In the June quarter, SoftBank reported a 256.55 billion yen investment loss for its other holdings, which weighed on the group’s overall profit. The Japanese firm said it posted an investment loss on the sale of shares of T-Mobile and Alibaba, which was partially offset by a gain on shares of semiconductor giant Nvidia.

SoftBank said on Thursday that it sold 13 million shares of T-Mobile in August for $3 billion.

Meanwhile Arm, the chip designer that is majority-owned by SoftBank, contributed a 8.66 billion yen loss to the Japanese company. SoftBank attributed this to increase research and development expenses, which led to investments growing faster than revenues.