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U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

(www.cnbc.com)
607 points givemeethekeys | 4 comments | 22 Aug 25 21:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.865s | source
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alephnerd ◴[22 Aug 25 21:25 UTC] No.44989996[source]▶
Good. It's very much a "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point" situation.

If Taiwan's NDF has ownership share in TSMC and UMC, China's CICIIF in SMIC, Japan's Master Trust in a majority of enterprises, and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala in GlobalFoundries, then we should as well.

The recent (50ish years) aversion to Industrial Policy in America has been pigheaded and ideological to a certain extent. If we wish to build capacity domestically, especially in high capex and low margins industry, some amount of government support is needed.

Funds that are overwhelmingly sourced via private capital cannot take the same risks to build an ecosystem that a Soverign Development Fund can. This is what the Master Trust (Japan), NDF (Taiwan), and Temasek (Singapore) did to build their own domestic industries in semiconductors and REE processing - industries with high capex, high IP barriers, and low margins.

This now sets the precedent to develop at sovereign development fund.

If we did this with GM and Solyndra a decade+ ago we would have been in a better position to protect our automotive and renewable industry, but ofc the GOP of that era along with a portion of the DNC was not ready to take such a risk.

The CHIPS and IRA acts were steps in the right direction, but couldn't really take full advantage of the stick.

Edit: Surprised that a forum that largely supports single payer healthcare opposes sovereign development funds, even though they themselves could help enforce pricing in a less complex manner than that which the CMS does today.

At some point this is just reflexive hatred.

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lazide ◴[22 Aug 25 21:29 UTC] No.44990051[source]▶
I don’t know, it sounds like the US gov’t just stole $11 bln from Intel shareholders - while intel is failing - while promising nothing?
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alephnerd ◴[22 Aug 25 21:31 UTC] No.44990062[source]▶
It's a similar amount to the stake from the CHIPS act.
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1. lazide ◴[22 Aug 25 21:31 UTC] No.44990069[source]▶
And?
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2. alephnerd ◴[22 Aug 25 21:35 UTC] No.44990111[source]▶
And fundamentally, I believe that any industrial stimulus should come with a mixture of government ownership as well as claw-back provisions should interests contravene national security.

Edit: cannot reply to you.

This deal literally comes with claw-back provisions.

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3. lazide ◴[22 Aug 25 21:38 UTC] No.44990146[source]▶
and does any of that seem to have anything to do with the current deal, or align with current legislation?

Or is it just a transparent shakedown?

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4. alephnerd ◴[23 Aug 25 17:15 UTC] No.44997439{3}[source]▶
The current deal comes with claw-back provisions, but I am more interested in the precedent it sets.

This plus the CHIPS+IRA has now set the precedent for states and the federal government to build an SDF. I don't trust this administration aside from a couple staffers, but this allows us in a post-Trump era to build SDFs and return to the industrial policy norms we had in the US before the 1980s with Reaganomics.

CHIPS and IRA themselves were able to be pushed by the Biden admin becuase Trump 1 set the precedent to ignore traditional norms.