SACRAMENTO, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Wednesday that people would be “outraged” if former President Joe Biden tried to strike the same deals that the Trump administration has with chipmakers Intel and Nvidia.
“This is outrageous. It’s reckless. If Joe Biden tried to nationalize Intel, if Joe Biden did a deal to send to H20 chips to China,” Newsom told POLITICO. “People would be outraged. Are you kidding me?”
President Donald Trump announced this month that the federal government would take a 10 percent equity stake in Intel, the only American manufacturer of advanced chips, weeks after negotiating for profits from semiconductor firms, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. All three companies are headquartered in California.
The Nvidia and AMD agreements drew backlash from national security hawks for allowing the two to once again export certain chips to China in exchange for giving the U.S. government 15 percent of the revenue.
But Intel, whose rise decades ago made it an icon of Silicon Valley, was the sticking point for Newsom.
“It sickens me to the core,” Newsom said earlier during POLITICO’s “The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit.”
“You just socialize and nationalize Intel.”
He returned to the issue a third time at the event, pointing out that the “nationalization of private industries is something they’re pretty good at in China” and predicting Beijing’s leader, Xi Jinping, was “loving this.”
Trump’s dealmaking in the sector marked a deviation from his predecessor in both cases.
He paid for the government’s $8.9 billion investment in Intel stock by repurposing funds that Biden had awarded it through grants from his signature CHIPS Act and a secretive Pentagon deal.
Nvidia designed the H20 chip to sell for the Chinese market after the Biden administration imposed export controls on more advanced versions. While the product offers less computational power than Nvidia’s top offerings, Beijing’s domestic tech giants have kept using it to train AI systems.
Biden national security officials had discussed placing additional restrictions to cover the H20 chip, but never took official action. The Trump administration initially banned it from being sold to China earlier this year, before reversing course ahead of trade talks with Xi.
