Former US President Donald Trump has called for the immediate resignation of Intel’s new chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, over alleged conflicts of interest.

In a statement on his Truth Social media platform on Thursday, Trump wrote: “The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem.”

Trump did not elaborate on the nature of the “conflicts” that he has alleged Tan to be embroiled in.

Trump’s comments on Tan, who previously served as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, came a day after Republican senator Tom Cotton wrote to Intel’s board chair Frank Yeary to express “concern about the security and integrity of Intel’s operations” given Tan’s Chinese business links.

A former executive at semiconductor firm TSMC, Tan has been an active investor in Chinese technology start-ups for nearly three decades.

Most recently, Tan has served as the chairman and founder of the venture capital firm Presidio in San Francisco, where he has overseen an investment portfolio that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into China-linked tech companies. Tan also has ties to Hong Kong-based investment firms G.Squared Ventures and Lakestar, according to a press release published by Intel earlier this month.

Earlier this week, Cotton also cited Tan’s past role as the chairman of California-based Cadence Design Systems, a provider of software for the design of semiconductors, as a major point of contention. On July 14, Cadence acknowledged that it had violated US export controls by selling chip design tools to a Chinese university with military ties.

Cadence’s sale to ShanghaiTech University has raised further questions about Tan’s relationships in the tech world and whether they are appropriate given the sensitive nature of Intel’s semiconductor business.

In a letter to Yeary published Wednesday, Cotton wrote: “Intel is required to be a responsible steward of American taxpayer dollars and to comply with applicable security regulations. Mr Tan’s associations raise questions about Intel’s ability to fulfill these obligations.”

Intel and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Trump’s post. But Intel’s shares did react on Thursday morning, with the company’s stock price in New York dropping by 3 percent in pre-market trade.

Tan, 63, officially took over as Intel CEO in March. Tan was named Intel CEO after the company’s board voted in December to oust his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger. The move came as the Santa Clara, California-headquartered company struggled to gain ground on the global market leader TSMC and experienced a string of delays in its manufacturing roadmap.

Tan has since set about the task of righting Intel’s fortunes by attempting to cut costs and control the spread of losses. The company’s pre-tax profit margin turned negative for the first time in the March quarter. Intel has faced difficulties trying to regain the ground that it lost to TSMC as well as to gain market share in artificial intelligence chips, an area in which the company has largely failed to break through.

Intel is considered to be at a make-or-break stage, and it has been awarded billions in government subsidies and loans to help improve its competitive position. The aim is to wean the United States off its reliance on TSMC and other foreign chipmakers in Taiwan and South Korea. But Intel’s struggle with TSMC has caused the company’s foundry business to languish, and the lag in cutting-edge technology means that Intel is already trailing far behind the Taiwanese firm.

In an interview with Bloomberg last month, Tan said that Intel needed a “significant external customer” to prop up its next-generation manufacturing process technology, otherwise it would have no choice but to end development. Tan’s comments did not elaborate on whether such a customer existed.