Political norms usually align nationalization calls with the left and market-based solutions with the right, yet President Donald Trump directed the US government to acquire a 10 percent stake in Intel. The government is purchasing $8.9 billion in company stock to support American technology and manufacturing leadership and reinforce dominance in artificial intelligence while strengthening national security, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said. Intel lost ground to Nvidia with hardware optimized for large-scale machine learning, and Intel stock fell roughly 60 percent in 2024 to below $20 by late December from about $70 in 2021. The move drew bipartisan criticism.
Politicians can end up with strange bedfellows in this chaotic age, but certain economic tenets are virtually incontrovertible: calls to nationalize industry typically come from the left, while the right steadfastly opposes those efforts in favor of market-based solutions. And yet, for some reason, the ever-chaotic president Donald Trump has directed the US government to acquire a 10 percent stake in the troubled chipmaker Intel - a bizarre and impractical move that's being decried across the ideological spectrum.
To state the obvious, Intel is not currently a winning bet. Its semiconductors were in great demand for decades - remember those "Intel Inside" stickers on personal computers sporting Pentium processors? - but heading into the age of AI, it's lost a staggering amount of ground to the upstart chipmaker Nvidia, which has captured the market with hardware specifically designed to train and operate cutting-edge machine learning algorithms at incredible scale, consequently overtaking Intel's revenue many times over.
Though it represented Silicon Valley ingenuity for many years, as the Motley Fool noted at the beginning of this year, Intel stock dropped 60 percent in 2024 alone, falling below $20 by late December. That's a particularly stunning fall from grace if you zoom out, with its share price pushing $70 back in 2021 before years of decline. (Its stock price lurched around a bit after the Trump news, but ultimately fell about a percentage point over the course of
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