2 days ago
Trump Administration Said to Discuss Stake in Intel
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Bloomberg's also learned that the Trump administration is in talks with Intel on the US government potentially taking a stake in the company. For more on the scoop, let's get to senior tech editor Nick Turner. Nick, thanks for joining us. A lot's changed this week. At the start of the week, we had President Trump pressuring the Intel CEO Lip-bu Tan to leave. Now we've got the US government potentially buying a stake in Intel. So what's changed? Well, the two men had a meeting, so I think that laid the groundwork for these latest discussions. And it seems like he's safe at the moment. That being Lip-bu Tan and his job at Intel. But it'll be interesting to see how this deal ultimately unfolds if it happens. But it would be just sort of kind of the latest White House attempt to sort of make a private public sector agreement that that would have been pretty unusual before this administration. So what are the details of this? Can you tell us from your reporting what you found out? Because it's also understood that, you know, this could have implications for Intel's Ohio plant. Yeah, I mean, that is kind of the crux of it. We don't have a lot of details in terms of of the money involved. What we know is that this plant in Ohio, it's sort of a collection of plants that ultimately they promised would become the biggest chip making facility in the world. This that was back during the Biden administration. And since then, they've kind of scaled back those plans. They've delayed the opening of the first plant until at least 20 the 2030s. And I know that certainly there's some legislators in Ohio and who want to see this happen faster. And and it seems like a priority for the White House as well. There's interesting political optics here as well, because, you know, we've had this news of a revenue sharing deal potentially with India and AMD over the sale of chips to China. And now this potentially the government taking a stake in a publicly listed company. This is the sort of thing that you might expect the Chinese Communist Party to do, getting involved in state owned businesses. What's what's the rationale here? Is there any precedent for this? You know, I mean, there's some maybe some recent precedent, as you just mentioned, with with this administration. But I think it is kind of charting new territory for the U.S. and and it will have to sort of see how it plays out. I mean, in the case of Intel, Intel does need help. I mean, I'm not sure whether they'll arrive at a figure that will put the company on the right track, per se. But certainly it's been losing money. It's been struggling to regain its technological edge. And the current CEO has really been focused on cost cutting, which makes it all the harder for the company to make good on promises to increase domestic manufacturing, which is obviously a Trump priority.
