No they didn’t. After Trump started making noise about their CEO, Lip-bu Tan, being Chinese they then took the shares at a “…discount to the current market price.”[1]
And the money for this _deal_ was primarily from the CHIPS act funds they were already awarded but had not been sent to them yet
> Of the total, $5.7 billion of the government funds will come from grants under the CHIPS Act that had been awarded but not paid, and $3.2 billion will come from separate government awards under a program to make secure chips.[1]
This was at gunpoint from the government’s monopoly on violence.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/22/intel-goverment-equity-stake...
???
The government had passed a law appropriating funds to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing in the US and spent some of it buying intel stock. How is that the government seizing Intel at gunpoint? I mean aside from the libertarian argument that the taxation necessary to raise those funds is theft?
Did you miss the part where it was already awarded to them, but the Trump admin then made it conditional?