Trump admin in talks to take a 10% stake in Intel, US gov would be the biggest shareholder

The Trump Administration is in talks with Intel to take a 10% stake in the company, by converting some (or all) of the CHIPS Act grant money from Intel into equity.

Bloomberg is reporting from a White House official and other people familiar with the matter, which would see the US government become Intel's largest shareholder. Intel is set to receive $10.9 billion in CHIPS Act grants for both commercial and military production, and at Intel's current market value, a 10% stake in the company would be worth around $10.5 billion.

According to Bloomberg's sources, the exact size of the stake in Intel, and whether the Trump administration decides to ink the deal, is "still in flux". White House spokesperson Kush Desai declined to comment on the specifics of the discussion, only saying that no deal is final until it's announced by the administration.

The US Commerce Department oversees the CHIPS Act, declining to comment, with Intel also declining to comment.

Bloomberg reports that the White House official also "floated the possibility" that the Trump administration could convert other CHIPS Act awards into equity stakes, but it wasn't clear whether this idea had "gained traction" deeper into the Trump administration, or whether officials even discussed the idea with any companies that would be affected by the move.

An injection of funds won't just automatically, overnight, buzz Intel back into relevancy as it has multiple fires to put out before it can reclaim any huge victory over any of its competitors: AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Apple, TSMC, Samsung, and others. AMD has been like a wrecking ball into the desktop CPU business with Ryzen, with a vengeance into HEDT with Ryzen Threadripper, and with monster core counts in the server and HPC businesses with EPYC.

Radeon is the only true competitor to GeForce, its Arc GPUs haven't made a big splash whatsoever, its AI GPU business is nothing but a tiny blip on NVIDIA's radar, and its semiconductor foundry business is nothing next to TSMC. All the cash in the world won't solve these issues overnight, nor will it bring back the tens of thousands of employees that Intel has ejected in the last 12-18 months.

However, having one of the leaders in its industry not only designing but making and fabbing next-generation CPUs on American soil is something the US both wants and needs. President Trump has been quite firm about this, with processor competitor Apple announcing another $100 billion investment for a total of $600B on US investments, also announcing its American Manufacturing Program (AMP) to boost domestic supply chains and advanced manufacturing.

And that's just surface level stuff... consumer CPUs and GPUs... but we're seeing decent steps in Intel rumors moving forward. One of the big deals with Intel right now is its Intel Foundry Services (IFS) division which in recent reports, had its future depending on securing customers for its next-gen Intel 14A process node, more on that in the link above.

If the company can't secure enough customers for its 14A node, it would continue manufacturing chips on 18A and other variants through to 2030, according to recent filings. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is working with customers to make sure its Intel 14A process is a success, where the CEO said that Intel 18A missed out on closer collaboration with external customers.