Wow, that would be monumentally stupid. The usual "government business aid" of loans, tax breaks and incentives isn't nearly enough to solve Intel's real problems. Intel needs cold, hard cash injected over a sustained period. Certainly more than $25B, probably more than $50B and, over time, maybe $100B. The executive branch on its own doesn't have enough extra cash available to do anything close to that and the chances such an unprecedented bill would pass a narrowly divided congress are basically nil.
People tend to get confused thinking "but the government has all the money and if they need to, they'll just print more." But it doesn't really work like that - and there are consequences. The U.S. government is deeply in debt and getting deeper by the day. Finding (or creating) that much extra actual CASH, that's not currently in the budget will likely have pretty serious negative consequences on the rest of the economy like even worse inflation or downgraded U.S. debt (making the entire national debt more expensive to service).
But even worse, private investors and public markets think of government bailout money as "dumb money", so they value it far lower than "smart money" deciding to come in and shore up a company, which can double a distressed stock before the check even clears. A government bailout will only provide a small, temporary lift in the stock price along with relatively little increased investor and employee confidence. And any serious chunk of government cash would certainly come with governance strings likely to make Intel even less nimble (assuming that's even possible).
I think one could argue that being able to make chips in the US is a national security concern. Leaving all the politics about who and why out of it, that kind of budget isn't out of the realm of possibility from that angle. Submarines, satellites, and aircraft cost a lot too.
Btw, I'm taking your word for it that it would require that amount of funding. I've wondered why Intel can't dig themselves out of the hole by adapting to the market. From my naive point of view, it sure seems like someone could make matrix multiply / relu chips a lot cheaper than Nvidia prices. I don't think people care much it being CUDA so long as they've got something to wrap up in Tensorflow or PyTorch or whatever.
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The last time something like this happened was during the Obama administration with General Motors. Back then I remember the Republican Party sharply criticizing Obama. Mitt Romney even said that the government should have let Detroit go bankrupt which came to haunt Romney in the 2012 Presidential Debates.
Is Intel now considered a “too big to fail” type company?
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