The federal government is once again writing checks to chipmakers — but this time it wants something back.
The Department of Commerce quietly announced this week that it signed letters of intent to direct more than $870 million in CHIPS Act funding to seven companies, including GlobalFoundries and Kepler, in exchange for minority equity stakes in each. The total comes to $874 million, according to Miranda Nazzaro's reporting for The Hill, surfaced by Techmeme.
A large slice of that is aimed squarely at artificial intelligence infrastructure. GlobalFoundries is set to receive $300 million to develop faster links between AI chips, according to a report published by 1470 & 100.3 WMBD.
That detail is worth pausing on. Much of the public conversation about AI hardware focuses on the processors themselves — how fast a single chip can crunch numbers. But modern AI systems run across thousands of chips wired together, and the connections between them are often the bottleneck. Money for "faster AI chip links" is money aimed at that plumbing rather than the headline processors.
The equity arrangement is the other notable shift. Traditional industrial subsidies hand out grants and hope for the best. Taking minority stakes means taxpayers hold a financial position in the companies they're funding — an approach that blurs the line between subsidy and investment.
Why it matters: how the U.S. structures these deals — grants versus ownership — will shape not just where advanced chips get built, but what the public gets in return.