The USA's entry into Intel's capital is to validate the final parts of the public aid granted by the CHIPS act.
To support "made in America" and preserve American innovation in certain fields considered strategic, the Biden administration set up the CHIPS act. This was a wide-ranging package of state aid granted to certain companies in the semiconductor sector. Of course, a company like Intel figured prominently, and the plan was to grant a total of $8.9 billion, part of which was paid out at the end of last year. Since that first instalment, however, there has been a change in the Oval Office and Joe Biden has given way to Donald Trump, but the 45th and 47th President of the United States had no intention of granting such aid without a direct return.
Howard Lutnick (Secretary of Commerce) and Lip-Bu Tan (Intel CEO), after the U.S. took a stake in the American group.
In fact, since his return to the White House, Donald Trump has regularly indicated that he was looking for quid pro quos to continue paying these subsidies. He has found one. In this case, it involves taking a stake in the American group, but in order to reassure investors, limits have been set. The Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, recently outlined these limits, explaining that there was no question of this stake giving the US government any voting rights: the government gets no seat on Intel's board of directors, and it is emphasized that the government "may exercise only limited exceptions" to decisions requiring its approval.
Why reassure investors? Simply because the participation obtained by the United States is anything but symbolic: in exchange for this $8.9 billion in aid, we're talking about 433.3 million shares in the American group, i.e. a stake of around 10%. It should be remembered that the most recent rumours indicate that the US government could be tempted by other operations of this kind and, who knows, perhaps enter the capital of Micron, Samsung or even TSMC.
