On August 29, 2025, President Donald Trump’s administration made a move that has set off a firestorm across the political spectrum: the U.S. government acquired a 10 percent stake in Intel, the iconic American chipmaker, by purchasing 433.3 million shares for a staggering $8.9 billion. The deal instantly made the federal government Intel’s largest shareholder, and it’s not just a one-off—Trump has signaled this is only the beginning of a broader strategy to create an American sovereign wealth fund, modeled in part on the massive state investment vehicles wielded by countries like China and Norway.
The decision, announced last Friday, followed a whirlwind of events that began earlier in August. According to reporting from Mises Wire, Trump was watching Fox Business when host Maria Bartiromo raised concerns about potential ties between Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and the Chinese military. Within minutes, Trump posted on social media demanding Tan’s immediate resignation—a move that sent Intel’s leadership scrambling. Three days later, Tan flew to Washington to meet with Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, where he insisted he was not a Chinese spy and that Intel’s financial health was essential for national security. Trump was reportedly convinced, but only agreed to drop his demand if Intel ceded a 10 percent equity stake to the government—a deal Tan ultimately accepted.
With the ink barely dry, Trump celebrated the arrangement as a win for American competitiveness, especially as global rivals like China deploy their own sovereign wealth funds to gain economic and strategic leverage. The president’s vision is clear: use the government’s new investment clout not just to earn profits, but to steer industrial policy and shore up strategically important, yet economically troubled, companies like Intel. “This is about keeping America competitive with other nations in the 21st century,” argued Daniel McCarthy in Creators.com, pointing to China’s $1.3 trillion China Investment Corporation and Hong Kong’s $1 trillion SAFE Investment Company as examples of the scale America now faces abroad.
But the move has ignited fierce debate, especially among conservatives. Some, like Texas Representative Chip Roy, are openly hostile to the idea of government ownership in private industry. In an interview with CNBC, Roy didn’t mince words: “What I don’t like is taking up stakes in private entities. And in terms of a sovereign wealth fund, we’ve got a massive amount of ability to produce wealth and capital in this country by virtue of free enterprise.” He continued, “Now, in the area of tech and AI and everything else, we’ve done that through our innovation and through private enterprise. We do not want to go down the road of government ownership of these things.”
Roy’s criticism echoes a broader unease on the right. As Daily Caller News Foundation columnist Jonah Goldberg quipped on X, “If there is anyone who was a halfway prominent mainstream conservative … 10 years ago who now tells me they wouldn’t have screamed about incipient ‘socialism!’ or ‘fascism!’ about Trump’s Intel ‘investment’, I presumptively assume they are lying …” The charge isn’t just rhetorical. Many conservatives have long equated state ownership of the means of production with textbook socialism, and the Intel deal seems to fly in the face of decades of free-market orthodoxy.
Yet, as McCarthy points out, America has a long history of government involvement in the private sector, from Nixon’s creation of Amtrak to the bailouts of banks and automakers during the Great Recession. What makes Trump’s approach different is the explicit use of government investment as a tool of industrial policy—picking winners and losers, rather than simply maximizing returns. “Trump is actually taking a double risk—most sovereign wealth funds only aim to maximize returns, producing revenue for the government. The president, however, also wants to conduct industrial policy with a sovereign wealth fund, by buying into strategically important but economically troubled companies like Intel,” McCarthy wrote.
Not everyone on the right is convinced this is the right path. Economist Bob Murphy, speaking on the Human Action Podcast, warned of a bipartisan drift toward “state capitalism” reminiscent of China’s model, where the government’s heavy hand in the economy blurs the line between public and private. “It’s time to start using the ‘F word’,” Murphy said, referencing fears of creeping fascism through state-corporate partnerships. He pointed to the long history of government intervention—from the Progressive Era’s regulatory agencies to the Federal Reserve’s creation and the New Deal’s expansion of state power—as evidence that America’s economy has always been more managed than many are willing to admit.
For some, the most troubling aspect is the risk of moral hazard. As McCarthy notes, the Great Recession revealed the dangers of government guarantees when financial institutions were deemed “too big to fail.” If the government is now a major shareholder in companies like Intel, what happens if those firms stumble? Will Washington bail them out, or let them fail? And if the government is both regulator and owner, can it be trusted to act in the public’s best interest?
Trump’s defenders argue that the Intel deal is not socialism, but realism—a necessary adaptation to a world where America’s rivals use state power to advance their own interests. Supporters on the political right have echoed Trump’s framing that the federal government is “us,” and so any deal that moves money or financial assets into federal accounts is equivalent to transferring that money to all Americans. Trump himself has downplayed the cost, insisting he “paid zero” for the stake because the funds used were already allocated under President Biden’s CHIPS Act.
But critics see a deeper irony. As Mises Wire’s Connor O’Keeffe observed, Trump’s plan closely resembles proposals from progressive figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have long advocated for a sovereign wealth fund to invest in U.S. industry. “By adopting the Sanders-Warren strategy for building a Biden-style sovereign wealth fund … the Trump administration reveals that they are more than happy to conserve the worst aspects of our interventionist political system, as long as they get to rebrand them as their own,” O’Keeffe wrote.
Despite the backlash, the administration appears undeterred. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC, “I’m sure that at some point there’ll be more transactions, if not in this industry, in other industries.” The government’s stake in Intel comes with no board seat or governing rights, according to the company, but the symbolism is hard to ignore: for the first time in generations, the U.S. government is not just a regulator or a lender of last resort—it is a major shareholder in one of America’s most important tech firms.
The debate over Trump’s Intel deal is far from settled. For some, it’s a pragmatic response to the realities of global competition; for others, it’s a dangerous flirtation with the very economic models America has long opposed. As the administration moves forward with plans for more government investments, the country finds itself at a crossroads—torn between the ideals of free enterprise and the imperatives of national strategy. The only certainty is that the stakes—for Intel, for the economy, and for American capitalism itself—have never been higher.
