The Trump Administration is reportedly in talks with Intel over the US government taking a stake in the struggling chip company.

According to a report from Bloomberg, should the deal go ahead, it would help support the construction of the chipmaker’s two planned fabs in New Albany and Licking County, Ohio, which are currently half a decade behind schedule.

The size of the potential stake is not known, but the plans came about after Trump met with Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan last week. Tan visited the White House after Republican Senator Tom Cotton accused the CEO of having “deep ties to the Chinese Communists,” and the President called on Tan to resign.

Bloomberg said the plans remain “fluid,” and that according to its sources, the talks could still end without an agreement.

Intel first confirmed its plan to build the new Ohio campus in January 2022, with then CEO Pat Gelsinger saying at the time that the company could spend as much as $100bn on the site over the next decade, a figure that would mark the largest single private investment in the state.

However, since then, the timeline for the completion of the fabs has continued to slip. In February 2024, it was reported that construction was not expected to be completed until 2026, a year later than the fabs’ original production date. In March the following year, just before Tan was appointed as the company’s new CEO, Intel again said it had pushed back the opening of the fabs to the early 2030s.

Despite having since announced it was pulling the plug on its planned European fabs, at the Intel Foundry Direct Connect event in San Jose, California, earlier this year, the company was keen to talk about increasing capacity at its manufacturing sites across the US, in particular at the company’s Arizona, Ohio, and Oregon fabs.

But, languishing revenue has seen Intel make cutbacks across the business. In addition to shuttering its Magdeburg, Germany, and Wrocław, Poland, sites, the chipmaker has also dismantled its Network and Edge Group (NEX) and cut 15 percent of its workforce – including employees at its Oregon fab.

Intel did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment. White House spokesman Kush Desai told the outlet: “Discussion about hypothetical deals should be regarded as speculation unless officially announced by the administration.”