The deal that struggling chipmaker Intel Corp struck with US President Donald Trump to give the US government a 10 percent stake in the company is still under discussion, the White House said on Thursday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the deal was a “creative solution” proposed by Trump that the US Department of Commerce was putting into action.
“The Intel deal is still being ironed out by the Department of Commerce,” Leavitt told a regular news briefing.
Photo: REUTERS
“The t’s are still being crossed, the i’s are still being dotted,” she said. “It’s very much still under discussion.”
Asked to elaborate, a White House official said some aspects of the Intel deal, namely a US$3 billion Secure Enclave award from the US Department of Defense, were not yet fully implemented.
It was not immediately clear if Leavitt’s remarks suggested the Intel deal could still be revised in some way.
Intel finance chief David Zinsner told an investor conference on Thursday that Intel received US$5.7 billion in cash on Wednesday night as part of the deal.
The Trump administration has also delayed announcing long-promised tariffs on imported semiconductor chips, with an administration official saying the news was not expected this week.
Separately, shares of Marvell Technology slumped 11.3 percent in premarket trading yesterday, as the chipmaker’s data center demand outlook fell short of lofty expectations after investors bet big on custom chips that power artificial intelligence (AI) workloads for cloud giants such as Microsoft and Amazon.
Investor expectations for AI-focused chipmakers have been elevated, but recent results have shown signs of a cooling market. Nvidia’s latest earnings beat forecasts, but its data center growth slowed and shares fell post-report. Peer Broadcom has yet to report.
Marvell’s reliance on so-called custom application-specific integrated circuits exposes it to customer inventory-led swings in demand.
Marvell CEO Matthew Murphy said on a post-earnings call on Thursday that data center revenue in the third quarter would be flat on a sequential basis, but did not elaborate on the source of the weakness.
Murphy said “lumpiness” was normal when large cloud compute providers build out infrastructure.
“We aren’t surprised at lumpiness, but we are surprised that the ASIC [chips business] full year [revenue] continues to fall,” Morgan Stanley analysts said.
A recent media report said that Microsoft had delayed its in-house AI chip rollout to 2028 or later, potentially impacting Marvell’s pipeline, as it supplies key components for those designs.
Marvell reported second-quarter revenue of US$2.01 billion, matching Wall Street expectations, but its third-quarter forecast of US$2.06 billion, plus or minus 5 percent, came in below analysts’ average estimate of US$2.11 billion.
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