Weekly: On the Nvidia-Intel deal
6 min read.
Highlights
A major investigation by the New York Times finding that the Trump and Witkoff families are profiting significantly, primarily through crypto, in exchange for the Middle East technology deal in May.
Several pieces about Nvidia-Intel deal in the WSJ, WIRED, and the Economist. The consensus seems to be that it is a good deal for Intel in that it is a lifeline for the struggling chipmaker and a good deal for Nvidia for technology reasons and also as it likely curries favour with the Trump administration.
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Table of Contents
Asa Fitch, “Is Nvidia Intel’s Savior? Not Quite,” WSJ, 09/19/2025.
Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany, Bradley Hope, Tripp Mickle, and Paul Mozur, “Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches.,” NYT, 09/15/2025.
Lauren Goode, “Jensen Huang Wants You to Know He’s Getting a Lot Out of the ‘Fantastic’ Nvidia-Intel Deal,” WIRED, 09/18/2025.
The Economist, “Nvidia’s $5bn stake in Intel is a shrewd political move,” The Economist, 09/18/2025.
1.
Asa Fitch, “Is Nvidia Intel’s Savior? Not Quite,” WSJ, 09/19/2025.
If Intel is to rekindle its lost glory, it needs more than a $5 billion investment and chip-development deal from Nvidia: It needs to split itself up.
The Nvidia deal, announced Thursday, was certainly good news for Intel. The investment brought in much-needed cash, and the chip deal brings Intel closer to the white-hot center of the AI boom—a position Nvidia has reserved almost exclusively for itself. Intel’s stock rose 23% following the moves.
But those are tactical wins at a time when Intel needs structural changes.
With Intel carved up, Nvidia could work with Intel chip-design teams on CPUs for data centers and personal computers—and then have them manufactured at TSMC, Samsung or Intel, without having to consider Intel’s manufacturing interests.
A side benefit of a split would be that investors—including the U.S. government, which recently bought a near 10% stake—could buy into Intel’s chip making or chip design rather than being exposed to both. U.S. national-security interests might be better served this way, given that concerns about domestic chip-making capabilities—not personal-computer CPU designs—have driven support for the industry in recent years.
One optimistic possibility is that Nvidia’s investment leads to further investments from other would-be customers of Intel’s foundry, which could provide capital Intel needs to build expensive state-of-the-art chip factories and put a hived-off foundry business on better financial footing.
That is the kind of investment Intel desperately needs.
2.
Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany, Bradley Hope, Tripp Mickle, and Paul Mozur, “Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got Crypto Riches.,” NYT, 09/15/2025.
Over the past few months, Mr. Witkoff and Sheikh Tahnoon had become both diplomatic allies and business partners, testing the limits of ethics rules while enriching the president, his family and his inner circle, according to an investigation by The New York Times.
At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically.
While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other, the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary. Taken together, they blurred the lines between personal and government business and raised questions about whether U.S. interests were served.
In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.
Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.
3.
Lauren Goode, “Jensen Huang Wants You to Know He’s Getting a Lot Out of the ‘Fantastic’ Nvidia-Intel Deal,” WIRED, 09/18/2025.
In a press briefing, Huang emphasized that the deal will allow Nvidia to scale its rack architecture systems that combine 72 GPUs with custom CPUs. Huang also said that working with Intel means Nvidia can take a bigger slice of the personal device market. “There are 150 million laptops sold per year,” he said. “We’re now creating a system-on-a-chip that fuses two processors into one giant SoC, and that will become a new class of integrated laptops that the world has never seen before.”
Huang estimated that the deal represents between “$25 billion and $50 billion of annual opportunity.”
The US government has also been reevaluating export controls, which have limited Nvidia’s (and AMD’s) ability to sell advanced GPUs to China. The administration recently said that it would grant export licenses to Nvidia and AMD, enabling them to sell certain chips to China, if the companies gave the US government a 15 percent cut of the proceeds.
Huang insisted that the Trump administration was not involved in Nvidia’s talks with Intel, which, according to Huang, have been going on for nearly a year. “The Trump administration had no involvement in this partnership at all,” Huang said. “They would have been very supportive, of course. Today, I had the opportunity to tell [Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick], and he was very excited and supportive of seeing American technology companies working together.”
Still, says Pat Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, “I do believe Nvidia scores points with the administration by making this investment.”
4.
The Economist, “Nvidia’s $5bn stake in Intel is a shrewd political move,” The Economist, 09/18/2025.
The backbone of the collaboration is Nvidia’s NVLink, which speeds up communication across GPUs and between GPUs and CPUs, and which Nvidia recently made available to third parties. This helps reinforce Nvidia’s position as a partner of choice in the world of AI. “The AI economy will run on systems where NVLink is the standard, and Nvidia decides who gets to plug in,” said analysts at Futurum Group, an IT-research firm. Nvidia’s shares climbed almost 3.5% after the announcement.
The deal, about a year in the making, marks a badly needed vote of confidence in Intel, which has struggled in the AI era against rival CPU-makers such as Arm (mostly owned by Japan’s SoftBank), and Advanced Micro Devices (whose shares slid on the news). But even if the partnership bolsters Intel’s CPU business, it does nothing for its contract manufacturing—or foundry—business, which is another key pillar of its survival. Neither Mr Huang nor Mr Tan suggested Nvidia had any immediate interest in Intel’s foundry business. In fact, they heaped praise on TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, based in Taiwan, which counts both American firms as clients.
Nvidia’s investment may help paper over that awkward detail; after all, it remains possible that the partnership will evolve. Yet it raises questions about the growing incestuousness in the AI economy. Nvidia is making a habit of doing deals with companies in which it holds big equity stakes. For instance, it recently struck a $6.3bn cloud-computing deal with Coreweave, an up-and-coming data-centre firm, of which it owns 6.6%. There is a fine line between seizing commercial opportunities and throwing lifelines.
If the AI bubble bursts, this interconnectedness could pull everyone down. But for now bullishness persists. Mr Huang says Nvidia is delighted to be a shareholder in Intel. That is not surprising. Before the partnership was announced, his firm bought Intel shares for $23.28 each. By the market’s close, they were worth $30.57. Worth a Cognac, surely?
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Cover photo by ChatGPT