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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: 0.462s | source
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jjcm ◴[22 Aug 25 22:36 UTC] No.44990743[source]▶
In general I would rather the government take a stake in corporations they're bailing out. I think the "too big to fail" bailouts in the past should have come with more of a cost for the business, so on one hand I'm glad this is finally happening.

On the other hand, I wish it were a more formalized process rather than this politicized "our president made a deal to save america!" / "Intel is back and the government is investing BUY INTEL SHARES" media event. These things should follow a strict set of rules and processes so investors and companies know what to expect. These kind of deals should be boring, not a media event.

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ch4s3 ◴[22 Aug 25 23:08 UTC] No.44991032[source]▶
I’d really rather we didn’t bail out these companies at all. It clearly creates moral hazard and makes it hard for better run companies to enter markets.
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JustExAWS ◴[22 Aug 25 23:13 UTC] No.44991093[source]▶
Chip manufacturing is too important for the US. We can’t be completely dependent on Taiwan. Nothing against Taiwan, it’s one attack away from being obliterated by China.

No company is going to come out of someone’s garage and build a chip fab.

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gizajob ◴[23 Aug 25 00:37 UTC] No.44991749[source]▶
Nvidia has a market cap of 4.5 trillion dollars and everyone is committing hundreds of billions to AI CapEx in their direction - they can afford to organise chip fabs if it really came to it. Ok TSMC and ASML would need to be on board but it could be done. Should be done in fact because even a simple SWOT analysis would show the risk to their business.
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1. viraptor ◴[23 Aug 25 00:50 UTC] No.44991838[source]▶
If Taiwan becomes practically inaccessible, is there any way another country can setup a competing fab (for the latest generation of chip sizes) without years of R&D? As far as I understand, the practical knowledge of how to do it doesn't exist right now. (Neither does the prerequisite tooling)
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2. gizajob ◴[23 Aug 25 01:03 UTC] No.44991929[source]▶
Given there’s fabs doing essentially the same thing elsewhere then yes. Getting down to 3nm and the technology and secrets that involves would take a while though.

TSMC can’t do it either without xUV lithography machines made by ASML in the Netherlands.

Furthermore there isn’t anything magical about about the current generation of chips that couldn’t be replicated at at a scale of 12 or 15 or 20 nanometers - it’s just that scaling down to that small allows for a greater density of transistors per wafer and thus increased power efficiency. An AI supercomputer could be built with chips with bigger transistors than 3nm it would just run hotter.

And investing in intel aside, one of Nvidias great competitive moats is CUDA and that’s software not hardware.

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3. viraptor ◴[23 Aug 25 01:52 UTC] No.44992261[source]▶
I meant specifically for a given small size. Sure larger ones can be and are produced elsewhere. But how many years behind is everyone else if they can't get any help at all from the current companies.
4. pfannkuchen ◴[23 Aug 25 02:43 UTC] No.44992602[source]▶
Aren’t the actual machines used in the fabs still made in Germany?