President Donald Trump says he is “just getting started” in what he describes as a new era of dealmaking between Washington and America’s biggest companies.

On Monday, the administration confirmed that its agreement to take a roughly 10% stake in Intel is only the beginning of what could evolve into a series of taxpayer-funded ownership deals, effectively laying the groundwork for what Trump has long envisioned: a U.S. sovereign wealth fund.

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council and a leading contender for the next Federal Reserve chair, made the administration’s intentions clear in an interview with CNBC.

“The president has made it clear all the way back to the campaign, he thinks that in the end, it would be great if the U.S. could start to build up a sovereign wealth fund. So I’m sure that at some point there’ll be more transactions, if not in this industry then other industries,” Hassett said.

The Intel deal is remarkable not only for its size but also for how it came about. Roughly $11 billion in grants pledged under the Biden-era CHIPS Act — a bipartisan policy aimed at boosting domestic semiconductor production — were converted into 433.3 million non-voting Intel shares. Trump has argued repeatedly that his predecessor’s CHIPS subsidies gave away taxpayer money without securing enough value in return. By turning grants into equity, he says, taxpayers now “own a piece” of America’s semiconductor future.

Trump, in his characteristic style, lashed out at skeptics of the agreement. “Why are ‘stupid’ people unhappy with that? I will make deals like that for our Country all day long,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I will also help those companies that make such lucrative deals with the United States. I love seeing their stock price go up, making the USA RICHER, AND RICHER.”

Intel’s stock rose more than 2% in early Monday trading following the announcement, closing at $25.25. The U.S. government purchased its shares at a $4 discount from Friday’s closing price of $24.80.

National Security and Industrial Policy

The White House has defended the intervention as a national security imperative. Intel, once the undisputed leader in chipmaking, has lost ground to foreign rivals like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Officials argue it is a strategic risk for the U.S. to rely so heavily on overseas suppliers for advanced chips that power smartphones, defense systems, and AI models.

“I said, I think it would be good having the United States as your partner,” Trump told reporters.

This is not the administration’s first corporate intervention. Earlier this year, the White House took a so-called “golden share” in U.S. Steel to secure protections for American workers after approving Japanese-based Nippon Steel’s acquisition of the company. Separately, Trump mandated a 15% remittance on high-end chip sales by Nvidia and AMD to China — a move that followed his decision to halt exports of the firms’ most advanced chips to Beijing.

Divisions Over “Corporate Statism”

Still, not everyone is convinced. The Wall Street Journal editorial board compared the Intel deal to “corporate statism,” likening it to the U.S. government’s controversial 2009 bailout of General Motors, in which taxpayers ultimately lost about $10 billion. Many fear a slippery slope in which the government grows too entangled in private industry, potentially distorting competition.

Intel itself has acknowledged potential risks. In a securities filing, the company warned that a 9.9% government stake could complicate its international business, especially given that 76% of its revenue comes from outside the United States, with China alone accounting for 29%. The filing noted that foreign subsidy laws and restrictions could be triggered by Washington’s new role as a shareholder, potentially straining global sales.

CEO Lip-Bu Tan struck a more conciliatory note, however. In a Commerce Department video posted Monday, he said: “I don’t need the grant. But I really look forward to having the U.S. government be my shareholder.”

However, the Intel agreement is effectively clearing away billions in outstanding CHIPS Act obligations, with the company’s obligations considered discharged “to the maximum extent permissible under applicable law,” except for its Secure Enclave program. But it has also raised the possibility that other government entities may demand to convert existing grants into equity stakes, reshaping how Washington does industrial policy.

That is believed to be precisely the point for Trump. By recasting subsidies as investments, he believes that he is setting the foundation for a sovereign wealth fund that could expand across industries — from steel to semiconductors and potentially beyond.

“We will do a lot more deals like that,” Trump promised.

However, only time will tell whether taxpayers end up richer, as Trump insists, or whether this gamble on corporate equity echoes past interventions where the U.S. public shouldered the downside risk while private companies reaped the rewards.

Young people: follow your TALENT, and not your passion, if you want to have financial independence. Why? No one hires passion or pay for passion. People pay for talent (inborn natural ability) or skill (acquired).

China is banking on artificial intelligence (AI) to become a new growth engine, with projections suggesting it could add several trillion yuan to the economy by 2035 amid a sweeping national push for computing power and a unified data market.

At the China Computing Power Conference held in Datong, Shanxi province, over the weekend, Beijing showcased the depth of this ambition. Officials announced that 10 provinces and municipalities – ranging from Shanghai and Zhejiang in the east to Qinghai and Xinjiang in the west – had joined a unified computing platform designed to match surging business demand with underused resources across regions.

The initiative marks a critical step in knitting together China’s patchwork of regional computing hubs into a seamless national grid. State broadcaster CCTV reported that the platform had already onboarded more than 100 service providers, 1,000 industry users, and nearly 100 AI models, underscoring the speed at which Beijing is mobilizing both state and private sectors to build capacity.

This drive comes after years of heavy investment in data centers and semiconductor development as part of China’s self-reliance campaign, particularly amid escalating technology tensions with the United States. Over the past five years, China’s overall computing capacity has expanded by about 30 percent annually. This expansion is set to accelerate: smart computing power, tailored for AI applications, is projected to grow by 43 percent this year alone, according to an AI-computing-power assessment by the International Data Corporation and Inspur Information.

The International Data Corporation also projected that between 2023 and 2028, China’s smart computing power would grow at a compound annual rate of 46.2 percent—far outpacing the 18.8 percent growth expected for general-purpose computing.

Rao Shaoyang of the China Telecom Research Institute framed the potential scale of this transformation, stating that AI could contribute more than 11 trillion yuan (about $1.5 trillion) to China’s GDP by 2035. If realized, this would cement AI as one of the country’s primary engines of economic growth.

This effort mirrors a similar push in the United States, where Washington has made AI infrastructure central to future competitiveness. The Biden administration supported federal funding for advanced chips, new data centers, and AI research hubs through initiatives tied to the CHIPS and Science Act. The U.S. is also building a more distributed AI ecosystem, with national labs, major universities, and cloud providers expanding computing clusters to serve researchers and private companies.

President Donald Trump, in January, announced Stargate, a $500 billion AI investment initiative aimed at cementing America’s leadership in artificial intelligence. But unlike China’s centrally coordinated approach, the U.S. model relies on partnerships between government, academia, and industry, with companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, SoftBank, and Google Cloud playing an outsized role in supplying computing resources.

The parallel efforts underscore how the world’s two largest economies are racing to make AI the backbone of future growth. While China is banking on a state-led, unified data and computing system to supercharge its AI economy, the U.S. is banking on a mix of private sector innovation and government-backed infrastructure. Both see AI not just as a technological frontier but as an economic pillar that could define global leadership in the decades ahead.

Against this backdrop, China hopes to reduce inefficiencies, cut reliance on foreign technology, and build a data infrastructure that can support industries from finance to healthcare and advanced manufacturing by weaving together its computing resources.

Beijing’s approach contrasts sharply with Western markets, where computing resources are often fragmented across competing private providers. China is betting that scale and coordination will give its industries an edge in the global race for AI dominance by building a centralized, state-backed platform.

The broader strategy reflects a recognition that AI leadership will depend as much on raw computing power and data as on algorithms. As the U.S. continues to tighten restrictions on high-end chips and cloud services available to Chinese firms, Beijing’s response has been to accelerate its domestic capabilities.

With the unified computing power network already attracting a critical mass of users and models, analysts say the challenge ahead will be ensuring interoperability, maintaining security across provinces, and driving adoption in traditional industries.