United States President Donald Trump has announced that the US government has secured a 10% stake in struggling Silicon Valley pioneer Intel in a deal that was completed just a couple of weeks after he was depicting the company’s CEO as a conflicted leader unfit for the job.
“The United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Friday.
The US government is getting the stake through the conversion of $11.1 billion in previously issued funds and pledges. All told, the government is getting 433.3 million shares of non-voting stock priced at $20.47 apiece—a discount from Friday’s closing price at $24.80. That spread means the US government already has a gain of $1.9 billion, on paper.
The company’s market value currently stands at about $108 billion—a fraction of the current chip kingpin, Nvidia, which is valued at $4.3 trillion.
The remarkable turn of events makes the US government one of Intel’s largest shareholders at a time that the Santa Clara, California, company is in the process of jettisoning more than 20,000 workers as part of its latest attempt to bounce back from years of missteps taken under a variety of CEOs.
Intel’s current CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has only been on the job for slightly more than five months, and earlier this month, it looked like he might be on shaky ground already after some lawmakers raised national security concerns about his past investments in Chinese companies while he was a venture capitalist.
Trump latched on to those concerns in an August 7 post demanding that Tan resign.
But Trump backed off after the Malaysian-born Tan professed his allegiance to the US in a public letter to Intel employees and went to the White House to meet with the president, leading to a deal that now has the US government betting that the company is on the comeback trail after losing more than $22 billion since the end of 2023.
Trump hailed Tan as “highly respected” CEO in his Friday post.
The stake is coming primarily through US government grants to Intel through the CHIPS and Science Act that was started under President Joe Biden’s administration as a way to foster more domestic manufacturing of computer chips to lessen the dependence on overseas factories.
