Intel’s deal with Trump includes a penalty clause against selling off its fabs Intel's agreement with the US government includes a clause that would allow the feds to take an additional five percent stake in the chipmaker if it ceases to have a controlling share in its foundry business. Trump's administration last week took a 10 percent equity stake in the ailing semiconductor giant, taking Intel shares …
Until it is spun off from the x86 side. There's a reason why TSMC has long made an ironclad promise that they will not engage in any design work, because they know that a lot of companies will not contract with a competitor. Heck, that's one of the big reasons why Apple left Samsung's foundry and went to TSMC. Had Samsung spun that off they might have kept Apple's business and all those billions that helped TSMC get as big as it has become would have gone to Samsung instead.
They can't do it yet because the foundry needs to begin standing on its own two feet, but there needs to be an announced timeline (or at least privately communicated timeline) if they hope to be successful as a foundry in the long run.
There is still some business/good synergies[a] you can do in those conditions. Before being acquired by Intel, Altera contracted (nearly?) exclusively with Intel's foundries in a bit of a win-win: Altera got a little discount, Intel got the perfect guinea pig for new processes (FPGAs apparently are relatively simple/fault tolerant ASIC designs).
[a]: Sorry for the marketdroid lingo; if it makes any reader feel better, I threw up as I was writing it.
