SINGAPORE: A billion-dollar Chinese plan to invest in Western Digital Corp is designed to plug the US data storage firm into a network of influential China tech players carefully constructed by Tsinghua University, the alma mater of President Xi Jinping.
For US$3.8bil, a unit of state-owned Tsinghua Holdings Co will get a 15% stake in Western Digital. What Tsinghua, run by a university committee, hopes to get is the latest in a string of domestic and foreign footholds in data storage and the chip market, an area deemed of strategic importance by Beijing.