Mr. TAN Yew Kong
Senior Vice President and General Manager of APAC Manufacturing and the GF Singapore Site, GlobalFoundries | SEMI Southeast Asia Regional Advisory Board Member
Tan Yew Kong is Senior Vice President and General Manager of APAC manufacturing and the GF Singapore site. In this role, he oversees GF’s business at the Singapore site and manufacturing partnerships across the Asia-Pacific region.
Prior to this, Mr. Tan was General Manager of GF’s 300mm manufacturing operation and 200mm manufacturing operation in Singapore, where he managed operations to achieve greater levels of performance measured across quality, yield, cost, delivery and customer satisfaction metrics.
He also spearheaded digital manufacturing transformation, scaling I4.0 solutions across GF, including GF’s 300mm Fab in Singapore which has been named to the World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network of advanced manufacturers in 2025.
Mr Tan is Vice Chairman of the Singapore Semiconductor Industry Association and a member of the SEMI Southeast Asia Regional Advisory Board. He also serves on the Technology and Innovation Committee under the Singapore Government’s Economic Strategy Review.
A 30-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, he holds a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Keynote 2
AI in Semiconductor Manufacturing: From Promise to Practice
AI is often imagined as a perfect end state, an investment made which runs itself and decisions made at the push of a button. In practice, turning AI into real value in semiconductor manufacturing takes time, persistence and a mindset shift in our people. In this keynote session, Tan Yew Kong addresses the common fallacies in AI deployment and why the path to achieve impact is rarely linear. Taking the audience through GlobalFoundries’ AI journey, the key building blocks and success factors in implementation, he will highlight how progress depends as much in trust, collaboration and human judgment, as it does on technology. This keynote underscores how AI becomes a true partner for success when people are empowered, expectations are grounded and inclusive learning happens together - so AI becomes a practical partner on the fab floor and not just a promise.