Daily Tech News 23 August 2025

• The US government has signed a deal with Intel to convert $8.9 billion in planned but as yet unpaid grants under the CHIPS act into a 9.9% stake in the company. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The previously planned grants did not offer the government an ownership stake, but came with technical goals that Intel may not be able to meet in the current climate, making the revised deal a palatable alternative. Intel stock was up 5.5% after the news broke on Friday.
  
  
  
• In addition, if Intel decides to sell off a majority of its chip foundry division, the government will have the option to buy another 5% of Intel common shares at the same price of $20. (WCCFTech)
  
  With great bargains come great responsibility.

• In further addition, the government is looking at allocating $2 billion of the $8 billion unspent in the Biden Administration's CHIPs to break China's stranglehold on rare earth elements. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Rare earth elements are not particularly rare. China has significant reserves, yes, but so do the United States, Brazil, India, Vietnam, Australia, and possibly Greenland.
  
  
  
• Minisforum is planning another of those AMD Strix Halo mini-PCs. (WCCFTech)
  
  Same core specs as the rest: Sixteen CPU cores, 40 GPU cores that work well for games and very well for AI, and 128GB of RAM of which up to 96GB can be assigned to GPU tasks.
  
  This model also comes with why-the-hell-didn't they just call it USB5 - that is, UBS4 v2, which has the new 80GBps trinary data link found in Thunderbolt 5. You can just plug two of those directly together to build a small but fast cluster.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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