By Nandita Bose and Max A. Cherney
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is looking into the federal government taking equity stakes in computer chip manufacturers that receive CHIPS Act funding to build factories in the country, two sources said.
Expanding on a plan to receive an equity stake in Intel in exchange for cash grants, a White House official and a person familiar with the situation said Lutnick is exploring how the U.S. can receive equity stakes in exchange for CHIPS Act funding for companies such as Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung. Much of the funding has not yet been dispersed.
Aside from Intel, memory chipmaker Micron is the biggest U.S. recipient of CHIPS Act cash. TSMC declined comment. Micron, Samsung and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed on Tuesday that Lutnick was working on a deal with Intel to take a 10% government stake. “The president wants to put America’s needs first, both from a national security and economic perspective, and it’s a creative idea that has never been done before,” she told reporters.
While Lutnick said earlier on CNBC that the U.S. does not want to tell Intel how to run its operations, any investment would be unprecedented and ramps up a new era of U.S. influence on the big companies. In the past, the U.S. has taken stakes in companies to provide cash and build confidence in times of economic upheaval and uncertainty.
In a similar move earlier this year, Trump approved Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel after being promised a “golden share” that would prevent the companies from reducing or delaying promised investments, transferring production or jobs outside the U.S., or closing or idling plants before certain time frames, without the president’s consent.
The two sources said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is also involved in the CHIPS Act discussions, but that Lutnick is driving the process. The Commerce Department oversees the $52.7 billion CHIPS Act, formally known as the CHIPS and Science Act. The act provides funding for research and grants for building chip plants in the U.S.
Lutnick has been pushing the equity idea, the sources said, adding that Trump likes the idea.
The U.S. Commerce Department late last year finalized subsidies of $4.75 billion for Samsung, $6.2 billion for Micron and $6.6 billion for TSMC to produce semiconductors in the U.S.
In June, Lutnick said the department was re-negotiating some of former President Joe Biden’s grants to semiconductor firms, calling them “overly generous”. He noted at the time that Micron offered to increase its spending on chip plants in the U.S.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington and Max Cherney in San Francisco; additional reporting by David Shepardson and Alexandra Alper in Washington and Milana Vinn in New York; writing by Chris Sanders; Editing by David Gregorio)
