Technology

A company worth over $130bn, listed on the Nasdaq, with revenues of over $53bn a year doesn't sound like a candidate for a bail-out. Particularly not when the company has been the dominant player in its market segment for five decades. Yet, despite all of the above, Intel has been forced to cling to multiple lifelines thrown to it over the past two months. I wrote about Intel's woes just over a year ago, and its finances have worsened dramatically since then. In its last full year results, announced in December 2024, the company reported a loss of over $18bn. Its results for the first two quarters of 2025 have been better, but only in the sense of losing $4bn rather than $9bn.

This situation has clearly alarmed the Trump administration, which rushed to buy a 10% stake (then worth $8.9bn) in late August. The US government typically avoids taking stakes in private sector firms, unless the situation is particularly dire, such as in upheavals of the global financial crisis in 2008.