Applying strong pressure on Apple and Nvidia, the White House is pulling out all the stops to support Intel.

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Over the past year, the Trump administration has continued its deep involvement in Intel’s operations and client expansion, pressuring tech giants such as Apple and Nvidia to facilitate a series of heavyweight partnerships for Intel. According to the Wall Street Journal report on July 10, this is one of the most direct cases of U.S. government intervention in private tech companies in recent years.

Intel’s stock price has more than quadrupled since CEO Lip Bu Tan took office in March 2025. The company’s business has clearly improved, but challenges remain severe—in the past four fiscal quarters, Intel’s foundry business has accumulated operational losses of $10.4 billion.

Tariff Negotiations as "Leverage", Apple Pushed Towards Intel

Last summer, Apple CEO Cook went to Washington to lobby the Trump administration to abandon plans for a 100% tariff on all semiconductor imports. If implemented, this tariff would directly raise the cost of Apple’s core products.

Apple ultimately obtained an exemption, at the cost of committing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars more in the U.S. But according to the Wall Street Journal, citing government officials, during meetings with Cook, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made another request: they wanted Apple to use Intel’s foundries to produce some of its chips.

Later, Trump announced on Truth Social that Apple would begin using chips made by Intel. He wrote: "I decided to help Intel because we need to design and manufacture our chips domestically in the United States."

According to a source, Apple plans for Intel to produce chips for both Mac laptops and iPhones. The report highlights that ties between the tariff negotiations and the potential Apple-Intel collaboration had not previously been disclosed.

Government Takes Stake, Facilitates Nvidia and SpaceX to Follow

At the same time as Apple negotiations were progressing, the U.S. government took more direct action—converting $9 billion of federal subsidies into a 10% equity stake in Intel, making it its largest shareholder.

This move quickly produced a demonstration effect.

In September last year, Nvidia announced a $5 billion investment in Intel and purchased custom data center chips. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called it a "historic" partnership.

This April, Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced that Intel would join its "Terafab" manufacturing plan, assisting with "large-scale design, manufacturing and packaging of ultra-high-performance chips."

Japanese SoftBank also invested $2 billion in Intel in August last year.

These capital injections are significant. Intel executives stated that without the immediate capital brought by the government’s share conversion and investments from Nvidia and SoftBank, the company would have had to sharply cut capital expenditures in the past year.

Department of Commerce Deeply Involved, Monitors Foundry Progress

White House involvement extended beyond brokering deals, reaching into day-to-day operations.

According to reports, Lip Bu Tan travels to Washington about once a month for meetings with Commerce Department officials and regularly speaks with Commerce Secretary Lutnick to update on client relationships and business progress.

The Commerce Department's "Chip Czar," veteran semiconductor investment banker Bill Frauenhofer, is even more deeply involved—he receives quarterly briefings from Intel CFO David Zinsner, and his team meets regularly with Intel executives in Washington and at the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, to track new manufacturing technology progress.

Commerce Department officials have made clear they want more chip manufacturing to remain in the U.S. rather than in Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan. They are particularly focused on Intel’s foundry business and are pushing Intel to expand advanced packaging capacity at its New Mexico plant.

Both Intel and the government believe that advanced packaging is the best entry point for Intel to compete with TSMC. Intel CFO Zinsner said in a January earnings call that the foundry business is poised to gain billions in revenue from advanced packaging in the near future, "which is even more exciting than I expected."

Lip Bu Tan’s Internal Reforms: Cutting Costs, Restructuring, Poaching Rivals

Beyond government backing, Lip Bu Tan himself is driving large-scale internal transformation.

Last September, Lip Bu Tan reorganized Intel’s reporting structure, founded the new "Central Engineering Group," and recruited top chip engineer Srinivasan Iyengar from Cadence to integrate custom chip design into a unified team.

He has also recruited senior executives en masse from competitors like Samsung and SK Hynix, and has given engineer Naga Chandrasekaran much greater authority—Chandrasekaran, with a deep semiconductor technical background, has become the most important sales leader for the foundry business.

As for capital expenditure strategy, Lip Bu Tan shifted investment focus from building new foundries to purchasing precision manufacturing equipment, enhancing capacity for popular products like laptop and data center CPUs.

The effects are beginning to show. This April, Intel reported quarterly data center revenue up 22% year-on-year, reaching $5.1 billion, and Google Cloud also announced large-scale purchases of Intel Xeon CPUs for AI workloads. Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud’s VP of AI and Compute Infrastructure, said: "When they listen to our feedback and act on it, it makes us even more excited to work with them."

However, Intel still reported a net loss of $3.7 billion for the quarter.

How Far Can the U.S. Government’s “Favoritism” Go?

This government-led industrial support is not without criticism.

Lawyer Scott Lincicome, specializing in trade and industrial policy at the Cato Institute, warned that the White House’s strong intervention in deal decisions of companies like Apple and Nvidia could set a bad precedent, "especially if Intel ultimately fails to fix its foundry business."

He said bluntly: "Being the government's darling only works when you're performing well. For Lip Bu Tan, the risk is—once things start going downhill, politicians’ timelines are very short."

Jacob Feldgoise, Senior Research Analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, is more optimistic: "From a technical perspective, Intel seems to be gaining more credibility and confidence. Each new customer commitment, each new manufacturing process launched, sends an increasingly positive signal."

Whether Intel can turn government backing into long-term competitiveness remains the market’s biggest uncertainty.

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