By Trump admin, do we mean the US Federal Government?
How is this legal?
It’s a bailout where the taxpayers actually get something back.
How is it legal to bail out whole banks or other large companies and not get anything in return?
Also how is not socialism? Imagine the wailing from Repugnants if the Democrats did this.
Socialism is social ownership of the means of production. This ain’t it. This is Turbo Capitalism.
Public ownership of companies for the benefit of the public is a form of socialism, but Trump’s fascist oligarchy serves only the wealthy elites. Oligarchs hijacking democracy for their own benefit isn’t socialism.
It is socialism, between them
Beyond the greater issues of corruption, at face value there’s no reason the government buying up a company with important strategic value should be illegal
It’s basically the GM bailout but with less steps and specifically avoiding bankruptcy which seems more efficient. Not that the gov’t won’t just turn around and run Intel into the ground.
Ars is making a mountain out of a molehill.
James McRitchie
Kristin Hull
These are literal activists investors known for taking such stances. It would be weird if they didn’t.
a company that’s not in crisis
Intel is literally circling the drain. It doesn’t look like it on paper, but the fab/chip design business is so long term that if they don’t get on track, they’re basically toast. And they’re also important to the military.
Intel stock is up, short term and YTD. CNBC was ooing and aahing over it today. Intel is not facing major investor backlash.
Of course there are blatant issues, like:
However, the US can vote “as it wishes,” Intel reported, and experts suggested to Reuters that regulations may be needed to “limit government opportunities for abuses such as insider trading.”
And we all know they’re going to insider trade the heck out of it, openly, and no one is going to stop them. Not to speak of the awful precedent this sets.
But the sentiment (not the way the admin went about it) is not a bad idea. Government ties/history mixed with private enterprise are why TSMC and Samsung Foundry are where they are today, and their bowed-out competitors are not.
Would it be the same as if they did the same with Boeing? If they were circling the drain? Since Boeing literally makes military planes for the US goververment, so that means that they can’t fail lest say they got bought by some Chinese or XYZ interest outside of the USA. So then those new owners would have access to highly classified designs and schematics that the military uses.
Shrug. The DoD is notorious for trying to keep competition between its suppliers alive. But I don’t know enough about the airplane business to say they’re in a death spiral or not.
The fab business is a bit unique because of the sheer scaling of planning and capital involved.
I dunno why you brought up China/foreign interests though. Intel’s military fab designs would likely never get sold overseas, and neither would the military arm of Boeing. I wouldn’t really care about that either way…
This is just about keeping one of three leading edge processor fabs on the planet alive, and of course the gov is a bit worried about the other two in Taiwan and South Korea.
noice, i respect a follow up that is honest about limits of their opinion and their knowledge. Opinion, i do think boeing should be partly absorbed, but i also believe this about certain foods that are on the store shelves for certain periods of time. Sort of like generic but publicly managed to an extent, keep competition open while maintaining security over long established and basics of human need and advancement, this was from a period of time i was not watching the fall of the US to a pedo rapist octogenarian.
I hope they lose billions on this deal. I know I’m only going with AMD now. It’s not much, but I do buy all the tech for my company. Servers, laptops, etc… will all be AMD going forward.
I’ve been building computers since 1999, and I’ve noticed that the industry is cyclical. I’ve purchased CPUs from both Intel and AMD. We need Intel to succeed, otherwise AMD will dominate the x86 processor market.
The architecture is in its swan song anyways. Let AMD ride it into the sunset and bid it good riddance.
Not having competition is not a good thing. I hope a third player comes along.
Literally illegal. Only AMD and Intel have the patent cross-licensing rights to make x86 chips. There used to be a third company (Cyrix and subsequently VIA), and (maybe?) still is, but it hasn’t been relevant to the desktop CPU market in decades.
The real competition will come from ARM-based computers.
We don’t need competition in the x86 space, we need competition in the mobile/desktop/server space. That could easily be performance competitive ARM or RISC-v or whatever. Better even with diversity of design.
Heck of an industry to break into.
Competitor is already here. Apple and Ampere are making ARM systems that fit most users needs. There are ARM servers. But people don’t want to switch.
I’d buy a macbook, but it’s a lot more expensive than my “throw Linux on a used corporate thinkpad” approach, and I can tolerate macOS, but don’t love it. If you’re in the market for a new premium laptop, I think they’re pretty established, and I do think people are buying them.
Ampere workstations are cool, but in a price range where most customers are probably corporate, and they’ll mostly buy what they know works. I think their offerings are mostly niche for engineers who do dev work with stuff that will run on arm servers.
I’d say non-corporate arm adoption will grow when there’s more affordable new and used options from mainstream manufacturers. Most people won’t go for an expensive niche option, and probably don’t care about architecture. Most Apple machines probably sell because they’re Apple machines, not because of the chip inside.
I don’t know exact numbers, but I do feel that arm server adoption isn’t going to badly, especially with new web servers.
I own an M1 MacBook. I don’t use it nearly as much as my main pc (gaming laptop with CachyOS (Arch-based, btw)) but it’s very well built and is well optimized. If I could get the build of a MacBook but with the specs of my gaming pc without spending 2x the price as I would on a pre-build windows machine I would absolutely do it.
Apple doesn’t really exist as a competitor for a number of industries and use cases due to not officially supporting anything other than OSX so I’m not sure if they’re a fair comparison here.
The only real edge they have is in non-gaming related consumer workloads.
Would TSMC be considered a competitor to AMD?
No. AMD is fabless; TSMC doesn’t design chips. They’re in different parts of the supply chain.
In fact, AMD is a customer of TSMC.
intel must still be hanging on purely based on corporate computers? or is there something else they are a large part of?
this just be in my bubble, but i feel like anyone i know over the last 15 years has been exclusively getting AMD, whether theyre tech savvy or just a regular consumer.
A lot of people I work with still buy Intel based on brand recognition alone. Most are tech savvy people too.
15 years? absolutely not. Before Ryzen in 2017 almost no one was buying AMD.
edit:
AMD is at 32.2% unit share of Desktop/Laptop PCs in Q2 2025. Lots of people still buying Intel.
Athlon64 x2s fucking dominated Pentiums back in the mid 2000s, but the market for people playing games was much smaller. Only with the i-series did Intel come back on top. Ryzen was great when it came out for budget gaming, but Intel still was supreme in perforce until the Ryzen 3D processors came out.
the person above said:
anyone i know over the last 15 years has been exclusively getting AMD
that is 100% nonsense. as stated above even today intel is still outselling AMD 2:1 in the PC market.
Oh I agree with you, but in my experience the people i know have predominately gone AMD as well. When I bought my 9900k, Reddit was HEAVILY downvoting any Intel support and upvoting AMD support. It doesn’t reflect the market, it I do see that in social trends.
…that said, while my 9900k still kicks ass, I am never going Intel again after recent news hahaha
I got a new work laptop recently. First one I’ve ever had that didn’t have an Intel cpu. Company is a decent sized multinational.
I think it’s already turning. But at the same time I don’t think the US can afford to let Intel fail entirely.
Defense contracting.
They do a a good amount of of military industrial contracting and work for 3 letter agencies on data processing/ high performance computing.
They also got awarded government funding in 2024 to build logic chips for the military in-country.
Not enough to sustain the company, but such “sensitive” programs may not be allowed to show up in revenue reports or have to be assigned to other areas or so.
Their new GPU has a pretty solid price/performance.
CPU is shit though
Can confirm my work laptop has an Intel chip
Investors should be going after executives who ran the company into the ground.
Also, intel could’ve refused the money. Nobody forcing them to take 11 billion of taxpayer dollars
Really, cos the graph looks like they bounced back to near 12 month highs?
Good point. But would the share price otherwise have been higher without the government discounted purchase? Share dilution, law of supply and demand, etc are all decent arguments the shareholders could make.
And there’s now increased risk that the purchase could cause future strategic and market challenges, especially internationally.
Plus it’s not just a share price issue. For example, the fact that shareholders have had their voting power diluted is arguably a concern.
Is the 10% new shares issued specifically for the government? I understood they were existing shares so dilution would not apply here.
New shares issued at a discount price. So a bit of a double punch for the existing share holders.
Still, you’re highlighting of the price going up is a good point, and maybe all my food-for-thought ramblings mean nothing. I guess we’ll see.
Your points are valid, the discount price is questionable. This is not my area of expertise, I only wanted to question if the headline was reactionary or if I missed something.
What backlash, exactly? The stock is up
Think long term. What kind of regulatory capture is going to happen? Protected companies stagnate instead of innovate. That 10%? That’s not a cash deal. It’s not revenue for the share holders. It’s basically the value of all the CHIPS deal and other things that Intel was already getting. They literally gave 10% of the company away for free.
And it’s illegal. And it’s communism. It’s everything Republicans hated when the Obama administration gave Solyndra a loan. This is pure corruption and will end badly for everyone.
The stock is up. But that’s not because this is good. It’s up because investors didn’t think this through. Short term profit vs long term fail.
Intel is stagnating since the x86 instruction set because the PC platform default. They have been a drag, along with microsoft on all things computers since the 1980s
Now imagine how government will effect that. You know how the government’s been trying to put back doors into hardware? A lot easier to do when you own part of a major chip manufacturer. Do you think having a steady supply of government orders will make them innovate or get lazier? Why is the government proving up a dragging company? Isn’t that picking losers and winners like Republicans had issues with in the Solyndra deal?
Intel failing isn’t a reason for the government to get involved, it’s a reason to stay away.
And it’s communism.
COOOOOOOOMMMUUUUUUNIIIIIIISSSSSMMMMMMMM!!!
This ain’t gonna be that buddy, this is capitalist maneuvers the whole way. Either funds will be shoveled into private pockets or the value of this will be juiced to support the extrajudicial shit that’s going on.
Prior to a week ago every conservative was 100% against any form of government corporate ownership. They hated TARP, Solyndra and quantitative easing. They went so far as to want to privatize social security and the post office. Countless hours have been spent justifying all of this and it was baked into their identity that it was all bad in any flavor.
Then, suddenly, Trump is for it and they fall into line without a moment of cognitive dilemma. Cult mentality. They cared about communism before and suddenly they don’t and they haven’t given us a reason. They haven’t admitted their change.
I don’t disagree with anything else you said, they are a cult it’s just not communist at all. Fascist yes
Not communist except for the government ownership of companies?
Plenty of capitalist companies are government owned. Canada has crown corporations, for example, that do generate profits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_companies
Are you in favor of this?
If the government owns every company, maybe you have communism, but most likely what you have is autocracy. If the government owns a 10% stake of one company, that’s some nationalisation. There are good reasons for it in capitalism, such as for regulating natural monopolies. I’m not sure Intel falls into "good reasons,’ since it appears to me to be some kind of corruption.
10% for now. Trump always changes his mind. One company for now. Except the 15% tax that exists only on Nvidia. 15% for now. Trump always changes his mind.
Broken record: if Biden or Obama did this the same MAGA people making excuses would be decrying this government overreach. And what happens when Trump isn’t in office anymore? When a Dem embraces and extends this governor power grab?
I agree with everything you said. But none of it is a rebuttal to what I said
