Intel will give the U.S. government a 10% stake, Trump says

President Trump said on Friday he had asked Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan for a 10% stake in the company during a recent meeting at the White House.

“He agreed, and they’ve agreed to do it, and I think it’s a great deal for them,” Trump told reporters. “He walked in wanting to keep his job, and he ended up giving us $10 billion for the United States,” Trump said.

Neither Intel nor the White House press team immediately responded to requests for comment.

But should such a deal move ahead, it would be a highly unusual step — it would mark an escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to push chipmakers to manufacture in the United States, and a new milestone in how willing CEOs are to cede the president an uecedented amount of control over their companies.

The nature of how a deal might work is not yet clear — and neither is the response of Intel’s board or shareholders.

Earlier this week, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC that a potential deal for an Intel stake would convert grants to Intel from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act into equity. The law authorized a total of nearly $53 billion in government funding for chip-related activities.

“So we’ll deliver the money, which was already committed under the Biden administration. We’ll get equity in return for it,” Lutnick said, adding the stake would not give the government voting or governance rights in Intel.

Intel, once a leader in chip production, has faced a raft of problems in recent years.

It has stumbled in the race to feed soaring data center demand for chips used to build artificial intelligence models known as graphics processing units, or GPUs. The leader in that field is Intel’s Santa Clara, California-based neighbor Nvidia, now the world’s biggest company with a market capitalization of over $4 trillion.

Intel’s revenue has fallen in recent years, driving its market capitalization down. This year, the company reported net losses for the first two quarters.

President Trump took direct aim at Intel CEO Tan earlier this month, calling on him to resign following reports he invested in a range of Chinese tech companies. Days later, Tan went to the White House for a face-to-face meeting with the president, after which Trump called the meeting “interesting” and Tan a “success.”

Intel is planning to invest more than $28 billion in two chip production facilities in Ohio, but the plans have been delayed and analysts say it is unclear if there will be sufficient demand for the chips the company eventually produces.

“That’s a key part of the puzzle,” he said, adding it was too early to know if a potential equity deal would be a boon for Intel or complicate the company’s efforts to try to lead the field again.