By Bill Alpert

President Donald Trump's administration is taking ownership of American business.

Friday, it took a 9.9% stake in Intel, in exchange for speeding up $9 billion in grants to the struggling chip maker. Other American firms that won some of the $39 billion in grants under the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 also may be asked to give up stock to get their money.

Barron's got no immediate response when it asked the administration and several Chips Act grantees if the government was discussing taking stock in exchange for grant disbursements. Those chip companies included Micron Technology, Texas Instruments, Applied Materials, GlobalFoundries, Amkor Technology, Analog Devices, Coherent, and Microchip Technology.

"I'm sure that at some point there'll be more transactions, if not in this industry, in other industries," Keven Hassett, the director of Trump's National Economic Council, told CNBC Monday.

There already have been. Last month, the Pentagon agreed to pay $400 million for 15% of MP Materials, the only domestic source of rare earth magnets. The government demanded 15% of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices chip sales in China, as well as a "golden share" in U.S. Steel that gives it veto power over actions that acquirer Nippon Steel might try.

"This actually is a sovereign wealth fund," says Salar Ghahramani, a business law professor at Penn State University who studies those entities. Nations like Norway, Singapore and Qatar own sovereign funds to invest their excess cash from oil revenue or trade surpluses.

But instead of the centrally managed funds run by those countries, Ghahramani says the Trump administration investments have been made by a federation of different agencies. "It will be fascinating to see whether down the road these assets that are being gathered will be put into a more traditional sovereign wealth fund."

The White House did publish a plan for a sovereign wealth fund in February, soon after Trump returned to the presidency.

A U.S. sovereign fund is "a very bad idea whose time may have come," says Bill Megginson, a finance professor at the University of Oklahoma's Price College of Business.

Unlike countries like Norway and Kuwait, the U.S. has a deficit, not a cash surplus, Megginson notes. America already has a skilled venture capital industry and deep financial markets.

"How transparent is this going to be," he wonders about the de facto U.S. sovereign fund. "And how politicized?" The Republican administration's precedent may inspire a future Democratic administration to get even more deeply into state ownership, Megginson worries.

Intel's 8-K filing shows that the Department of Commerce's agreement isn't entirely hands-off. The government agreed to vote in line with Intel's board, but not if an action would "adversely impact the Company's or its subsidiaries' relationship with the U.S. Government."

Analysts like Bernstein's Stacy A. Rasgon worry that the government will object if Intel decides to spin off its struggling chip production factories -- which could be exactly what the company needs to do, Rasgon writes in a Monday note.

Write to Bill Alpert at william.alpert@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 25, 2025 19:02 ET (23:02 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.