Yu’s presence at the meeting, along with Alibaba Group Holding founder Jack Ma, Tencent founder Pony Ma Huateng and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, did not go unnoticed. On Wednesday, Will Semiconductor’s shares jumped by the 10 per cent daily limit in Shanghai.
Yu founded Will Semiconductor in 2007 and has made successful investments in other chip companies. He was China’s 81st richest person with a net worth of US$4.72 billion, according to a list released by Forbes in November.
In another list by Hurun Research Institute in November, he was called “China’s Semiconductor King” and dubbed the country’s most generous person, with a donation of US$745 million for a new university, the Eastern Institute of Technology, in his hometown.
Born in Ningbo, a coastal city in eastern Zhejiang province, Yu graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1990. His alma mater counts a number of other founders of Chinese semiconductor companies as alumni, including Zhao Weiguo, the former chairman of Tsinghua Unigroup; Zhao Lidong, of Enflame Technology, a leading graphics-processing unit developer; and Feng Chenhui of Maxscend Microelectronics, which makes radio frequency chips.
After graduation, Yu joined Chinese information technology firm Inspur Group as an engineer and then took on executive roles at a few companies that distributed electronics components – before pivoting to chip design.
