10% equity isn’t much and wouldn’t influence Intel siginificantly but if they wanted to embed spyware in the CPUs they don’t even need to acquire any stake in it and probably already would have done so. All Intel CPUs for sometime now have been running Minix, it would have been easy for them to do so all along without doing so in the silicon directly. Plus Intel introduces security exploits in the CPU by themselves without the US government demanding it.

I read: Corrupt gov plans to sell 10% of Intel to their billionaire buddies.

At least it’s not a majority stake. Then it’ll be bad.

It seems to me that Intel themselves aren’t doing anything wrong here by letting the government take a stake in their business.

They never promised you privacy, they sell complex tiny calculators that add and compare ones and zeros trillions of times per second.

As a Mac user, I feel that it affirms Apple’s choice 5 years ago to design their own silicon. Apple made the right move.

Owners of current Intel chips should be fine. It’s future Intel chips I’d worry about. AMD is probably still fine. PC builders and enthusiasts still have a lot of good choices.

As for the government, I don’t really see how. 10% doesn’t give them enough clout to ask for a back door. The UK didn’t ask chip makers anyway, they went straight to Apple and asked for the encryption keys. Apparently they’ve dropped the request, but that’s not something that needs to be done at the CPU level. It’s also the government — they’re not gonna do it the best way. They’re not gonna do it the way a mad Linux geek would do it if they were a fascist dictator. Governments are still run by Boomers.

It’s more likely exactly what Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders say it is: the government is investing in Intel so their investment through the CHIPS Act pays off. It’s just good business sense. Set aside the president’s nationalism and look at it strictly as a business decision. It actually makes sense, hence why Sanders is behind it as well.