President Donald Trump has called for the resignation of Intel’s new chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, who was appointed by the company’s board earlier this year to lead the world’s largest advanced chipmaker. Trump claimed on his Truth Social platform on Thursday: “The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem.” Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The former president’s post on Intel’s CEO comes in the wake of a letter sent earlier this week by Republican Senator Tom Cotton to Intel’s board chair Frank Yeary over concerns about the new leadership. The senator had written in his letter that Tan’s “business connections to the PRC [China] raise concerns about the security and integrity of Intel’s operations, and I want to ensure that Intel is taking appropriate steps to protect U.S. technology.”

Tan, who took over as Intel CEO in March, is a Silicon Valley veteran with more than 30 years of experience in semiconductor and technology investment. In the past, Tan has also been an active investor in Chinese technology companies through his venture capital firm based in San Francisco, U.S., and Hong Kong.

Among his past investments are Chinese chipmaker SMIC, China’s largest semiconductor foundry by market cap, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, as well as publicly listed Chinese technology startups including JD.com, Alibaba, Baidu, Xiaomi, and Xiaomi Interactive Technology, among others.

Tan’s previous position as CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which makes chip design software, has also come under more intense scrutiny, as the California-based chip design software company admitted this week that it violated U.S. export controls last year when it sold a license for its chip design software to a Chinese university with strong military ties.

The Chinese business connections that Tan, a Singaporean citizen, has are just some of the factors that have prompted Senator Cotton to write to Intel and warn the company about its new CEO’s past investments. “Intel is required to be a responsible steward of American taxpayer dollars and to comply with applicable security regulations,” Cotton said in his letter to the Intel board chair, adding: “Mr Tan’s associations raise questions about Intel’s ability to fulfill these obligations.”

A growing number of investors and analysts are also raising questions about Tan’s recent cost-cutting efforts. Last month, Tan announced that he had initiated a program to trim costs to help the company reduce its cash burn. But Tan has also warned that Intel has been slow to deliver on its technology goals compared to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest chipmaker, and would need a large customer to maintain its lead. Analysts have suggested that Intel’s CEO is “in a tough position.”

Intel has been struggling to compete against TSMC, and the Taiwanese company has seen its global market share for semiconductor chips expand significantly since the 2000s. The U.S. semiconductor giant has also failed to capitalize on the new demand for artificial intelligence chips, which are at the center of current global competition for chip manufacturing leadership.

To remain competitive, Intel has been awarded billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds in the form of subsidies and low-interest loans. The government funds are part of a broad push by the Biden administration to encourage American chipmakers to scale up their semiconductor manufacturing capacity and make the U.S. less reliant on foreign chipmakers, particularly Taiwan and South Korea.

Intel CEO Tan is a highly respected executive in the semiconductor industry, but with his new position at the helm of the U.S.’s largest chipmaker, he now faces an enormous task in trying to keep Intel in the race for leading-edge chip manufacturing, something that its Taiwanese rival TSMC has been winning for more than a decade.