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President Donald Trump said he regrets not asking for a larger ownership stake in Intel when he negotiated the U.S. government's 9.9% holding in the chipmaker nine months ago. In an interview with Fortune published Monday, Trump described the exchange with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan that produced the deal.
Trump told Fortune 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."
The stake came about in August 2025, when U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced the government had taken an equity position in Intel. Government grants from the CHIPS Act totaling $5.7 billion, which had been awarded but not yet paid, were converted to equity along with $3.2 billion from separate government awards. Since then, according to CNBC, Intel's stock has increased by more than 300%.
April was Intel's best month in the chipmaker's 55 years on the Nasdaq, with the stock more than doubling. The rally has coincided with a resurgence of demand for Intel's central processing unit, known as a CPU.
Trump also told Fortune 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." He added: "Intel would have all that business now, and there would be no Taiwan," a reference to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC, the Taiwan-based world-leading chip manufacturer, carries a market cap of $1.84 trillion. Intel's sits at $547 billion.
Trump told the magazine the U.S. was "beating" China on artificial intelligence "by a lot," adding: "It's important that we win."
Intel has secured additional business partnerships in recent months. Earlier this month, Apple and Intel reportedly reached a preliminary agreement that would see Intel make some chips for Apple devices. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in April he plans to rely on Intel's future chips for his $119 billion Terafab project.
On the company's earnings call in April, Tan said demand for Intel's data center CPU exceeds supply. "The CPU is reinserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era," Tan said. Bank of America predicts the CPU market could more than double by 2030. Nvidia told CNBC in March that "CPUs are becoming the bottleneck" for AI.
