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U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel

(www.cnbc.com)
607 points givemeethekeys | 1 comments | 22 Aug 25 21:01 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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bongodongobob ◴[23 Aug 25 00:24 UTC] No.44991669[source]▶
Well as much as you don't like it, companies this big failing is terrible for the economy and in this case, national security to a degree. I'm of the thinking that when your company gets to a certain size we'd be well off nationalizing. Apple has more money than some nation states. Something that huge has the potential to affect global politics. There's lots of other reasons too, but this isn't like letting the corner store fail. The repercussions are huge. If we're going to bail out, the people should own some of it.
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UncleOxidant ◴[23 Aug 25 01:23 UTC] No.44992071[source]▶
> Apple has more money than some nation states.

And Apple needs their chips fabbed, so why not have Apple invest $50B into Intel? Nvidia could afford to chip in too. These companies that face a huge amount of geopolitical risk because they've put all of their eggs in the TSMC basket should have to pay for this not US taxpayers.

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hluska ◴[23 Aug 25 02:02 UTC] No.44992319[source]▶
You’re proposing that the United States government force Apple to invest in Intel? Apple chose a different supplier than Intel; at this point it’s hard to consider Intel a competitor to TSMC but let’s pretend they are.

You have proposed a “free market” system in which if you choose the wrong competitor you can be forced to bail out the chosen one. The economics of that don’t work at all.

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1. UncleOxidant ◴[23 Aug 25 22:03 UTC] No.44999491[source]▶
The free market is great if there are no discontinuities. However, being a greedy algorithm it's not great about planning ahead for things like geopolitical risk - such as some of the largest, most profitable companies putting the bulk of advanced CPU and GPU production in Taiwan. As such, if we're going to make adjustments so that we do try to plan ahead for potential disruption we need to incentivize companies that need fabs to produce their advanced devices to invest in some domestic production so that we're not over a barrel if China decides to invade Taiwan. I'd rather have Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, etc. make some investment and take some ownership in Intel than for the US government to do it. This is essentially what Craig Barrett has been proposing as well.