Nvidia gives Intel a lifeline with $5 billion common stock deal — September deal gets FTC approval for more than 217.4 million Intel shares at $23.28 per share
Back in September, Nvidia announced a historic equity investment into Intel worth $5 billion, joining the U.S. government in lending a lifeline to the floundering American chipmaker. Today, Intel has officially sold 214.7 million shares to Nvidia at $23.28 per share, reports Reuters. At the time of the original announcement, that number was 6% above market price, but it's now 36% below what Intel is currently trading at.
The purchase was cleared by the FTC in early December, so it was only a matter of time before we received this news. Intel is worth $172.67 billion at the time of writing, a drastic recovery from 2024 and much of 2025, where it had been valued as low as $82.71 billion.
Over the years, Intel's massive capex spending had put a strain on its financials, which was paired with growing national security concerns over CEO Lip-Bu Tan's former ties to China. Just a few months ago, this commotion had transpired into a dire situation where President Trump was seeking to oust CEO Lip-Bu Tan, but the two eventually reconciled, leading to Washington purchasing an $8.9 billion stake in Intel.
There's no release window for the upcoming RTX SoCs, and it'll take some time before any fruit is borne from the new partnership. But, it's safe to say they whenever they land, it could mark a significant shift in the industry, especially with a revitalized Intel at the helm. The chipmaker's foundry business has also started to find new life, with potential to challenge TSMC's U.S operations, thanks to its early adoption of High-NA EUV lithography.
Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
after the U.S. government had invested its own $8.9 billion into Intel.
That's a very weird way of putting it since the gov extorted those shares for the money they had already promised to intel from the CHIPS act.
hotaru251 said:
tin foil hat possibility: now they have incentive for their product to work better w/ intel.
So what's the difference?!
They always had incentive for their product to work better with the CPU that is in like 90% of x86 PCs.
Or at least was, and we didn't see any change in how well nvidia runs with AMD in the last few years where we saw more AMD cpus in PCs.
