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.
POWERING UP: PSUs for AI servers made up about 50% of Delta’s total server PSU revenue during the first three quarters of last year, the company said Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) reported record-high revenue of NT$161.61 billion (US$5.11 billion) for last quarter and said it remains positive about this quarter. Last quarter’s figure was up 7.6 percent from the previous quarter and 41.51 percent higher than a year earlier, and largely in line with Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co’s (元大投顧) forecast of NT$160 billion. Delta’s annual revenue last year rose 31.76 percent year-on-year to NT$554.89 billion, also a record high for the company. Its strong performance reflected continued demand for high-performance power solutions and advanced liquid-cooling products used in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers,
SIZE MATTERS: TSMC started phasing out 8-inch wafer production last year, while Samsung is more aggressively retiring 8-inch capacity, TrendForce said Chipmakers are expected to raise prices of 8-inch wafers by up to 20 percent this year on concern over supply constraints as major contract chipmakers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and Samsung Electronics Co gradually retire less advanced wafer capacity, TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said yesterday. It is the first significant across-the-board price hike since a global semiconductor correction in 2023, the Taipei-based market researcher said in a report. Global 8-inch wafer capacity slid 0.3 percent year-on-year last year, although 8-inch wafer prices still hovered at relatively stable levels throughout the year, TrendForce said. The downward trend is expected to continue this year,
Vincent Wei led fellow Singaporean farmers around an empty Malaysian plot, laying out plans for a greenhouse and rows of leafy vegetables. What he pitched was not just space for crops, but a lifeline for growers struggling to make ends meet in a city-state with high prices and little vacant land. The future agriculture hub is part of a joint special economic zone launched last year by the two neighbors, expected to cost US$123 million and produce 10,000 tonnes of fresh produce annually. It is attracting Singaporean farmers with promises of cheaper land, labor and energy just over the border.
US actor Matthew McConaughey has filed recordings of his image and voice with US patent authorities to protect them from unauthorized usage by artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, a representative said earlier this week. Several video clips and audio recordings were registered by the commercial arm of the Just Keep Livin’ Foundation, a non-profit created by the Oscar-winning actor and his wife, Camila, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office database. Many artists are increasingly concerned about the uncontrolled use of their image via generative AI since the rollout of ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools. Several US states have adopted
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