The White House Wanted To Make Money From 2 Chip Companies. Nearly A Year Later, It Hasn't Gotten A Cent.

President Donald Trump wants the U.S. government to get a slice of private sector profits as it tries to boost key industries like semiconductors and artificial intelligence, arguing the American people should benefit.

“There’s so much money and it’s so big that there are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public,” the president said recently of AI.

But the administration’s interventions in tech companies over the past year underscore how difficult that will be to accomplish.

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the federal government has taken an aggressive approach to industrial policy, negotiating stock ownership or profit-sharing agreements with at least 19 companies. None have yielded returns, either because the government hasn’t issued regulations to transfer the profits or because it would require selling stock that the administration wants to hold onto as it tries to prop up specific companies.

“They haven’t made a penny off of any of this stuff yet,” said Scott Lincicome, the vice president of general economics at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “They keep saying they’re going to, but it really only works under a scenario that, at this point, is highly speculative, if not unlikely.”

The lack of a financial return undermines a key justification for the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to intervene in private companies, which are fundamentally shifting the relationship between the public and private sectors.

Take the deals the Commerce Department struck last summer with chipmakers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to sell some of their less advanced chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent cut of the sales. According to the two companies’ recent reports to shareholders, that would entitle the government to about $63 million between August and December of 2025.

But as both companies underscored in their most recent shareholder reports, the administration has yet to issue the necessary regulations to codify the profit-sharing arrangement amid questions about their legality. As a result, the government hasn’t earned a cent from those deals, nearly a year later.

Any effort to take a share of the companies’ products would likely face legal challenges — experts point to language in the Constitution that expressly prohibits putting taxes or duties on exports from any state.

But a trade lawyer close to the Trump administration said the hold-up isn’t due to legal questions, per se.

“I wouldn’t assume the absence of a 15 percent charge reflects a legal obstacle,” said the lawyer, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “It may simply reflect a strategic judgment that other tools are producing better results.”

Indeed, the Trump administration took a different tack in February, imposing a 25 percent tariff on certain high-end semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan by U.S. firms Nvidia and AMD, but then brought to the U.S. for testing before being sold to Chinese companies — effectively another way to draw revenue from the companies’ semiconductor sales to China.

As of May 6, AMD still did not know whether any of the chips subject to that tariff “will be allowed into China,” according to its shareholder report. Chinese companies have not ordered Nvidia products containing the approved chips that would face the same tariff.

The Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment. Neither Nvidia nor AMD responded to requests either.

The efforts to make money off of the country’s semiconductor giants is just one part of a broader effort by the president and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to exert control over American manufacturing, in a break with both Republican orthodoxy and recent U.S. history.

The U.S. has taken ownership stakes in companies in the past, but typically only during crises — the railroads during the Civil War, manufacturers during World War II and stakes in General Motors, AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America during 2008’s Great Recession. That started to shift under former President Joe Biden, who helped shepherd legislation committing hundreds of billions of dollars to reshore semiconductor manufacturing and promote electric vehicle production (to the vocal criticism of Republicans).

Trump and Lutnick, a former Wall Street executive with no prior government experience, have gone much further.

In addition to the revenue-sharing deals, the administration has taken stakes in private companies and projects in strategic industries, arguing it’s a matter of national security. The hope is that the public funds will help attract additional investment from the private sector for critical manufacturing. But the administration has also made clear it has a pure money-making motive.

Shortly after threatening Intel’s CEO on social media, Trump announced last August that he would take a 10 percent stake in the beleaguered semiconductor manufacturer in exchange for an $8.9 billion investment. That public funding came on top of $2.2 billion in grants that Intel received from the CHIPS and Science Act, a signature piece of bipartisan legislation passed during the Biden administration.

“Donald Trump is fixing what Biden got completely, totally and utterly wrong,” Lutnick said on CNBC at the time, arguing that the Intel deal was a way for Trump to “turn the money that Biden was going to just give away” into “equity for the American people.”

Since then, the Trump administration has taken stakes in a number of other companies — mostly related to critical minerals, which are core components of everything from mobile phones to defense equipment. Per foreign investment agreements inked last year with the governments of Japan and South Korea, there will likely be more to come: The administration plans to claim stakes in projects that receive any of the $900 billion the two countries have pledged to invest in deals they reached with the White House to lower U.S. tariffs.

Earlier this month, Trump said he planned to meet with leaders of top American AI companies to discuss potential “partnerships” to share in profits. That meeting has yet to take place.

The federal government won’t make a significant amount of money off any of these shares, however, unless it sells them. But that would also mean pulling the public backing that is currently helping those companies fill financial gaps and attract more private investment.

“The only way this works for taxpayers is where the companies are so wildly successful in producing stuff and attracting private capital where the government can walk away without creating much risk to the companies,” Lincicome said.

Intel is aware of the risks. In its November stockholder report, the first after the deal, the company laid out several of the risks that could come from granting the federal government a 10 percent stake in the company, including the fact that the government’s priorities might conflict with shareholder interests.

“There is limited precedent for a U.S. company such as us having the U.S. government take a position as a significant stockholder,” the filing said. “As such, it is difficult to foresee all the potential consequences.”