U.S. President Donald Trump has said he should have asked for a bigger stake in chipmaker Intel, nine months on from a landmark deal that saw the U.S. government take a 9.9% holding in the company.
Describing his interaction with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Trump told Fortune in an interview published Monday that he asked for “10% ownership for free” of the company, Tan replied “you have a deal,” and the president said: “S—, I should have asked for more.”
Trump also told the magazine that Intel would be “the biggest company in the world right now,” if he had been in office to protect it with tariffs, “when all these companies started sending their chips in from China.”
“Intel would have all that business now, and there would be no Taiwan,” he added, referring to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the Taiwan-based world-leading chip manufacturer. TSMC has a market cap of $1.84 trillion, compared with Intel’s $547 billion.
In August, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the country had taken a stake in the chipmaker, whose share price had plummeted in preceding years. Government grants from the CHIPS Act of $5.7 billion, that had been awarded but not paid, were converted to equity along with $3.2 billion from separate government awards.
Intel’s stock has since increased by more than 300%.
Earlier this month, Apple and Intel reportedly reached a preliminary agreement that would see Intel make some chips for Apple devices, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in April he plans to rely on Intel’s future chips for his $119 billion Terafab project.
Trump told Fortune the U.S. was “beating” China on artificial intelligence “by a lot,” adding: “It’s important that we win.”
April was Intel’s best month in the chipmaker’s 55 years on the Nasdaq, with the stock more than doubling.
Intel’s rally has coincided with a resurgence of demand for its central processing unit, or CPU.
Bank of America predicts the CPU market could more than double by 2030, and Nvidia told CNBC in March that “CPUs are becoming the bottleneck” for AI.
“The CPU is reinserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era,” Tan said on the company’s earnings call in April, adding that demand for its data center CPU exceeds supply.
