Intel just cashed Nvidia’s $5 billion check. Intel says it completed the share sale to Nvidia on Dec. 26 after regulatory clearance earlier this month, turning a September announcement into settled cash and issued shares — and making Nvidia’s roughly 4% stake in Intel official.
Nvidia bought 214,776,632 shares at $23.28 apiece in a private placement, a round-number infusion that landed on Intel’s balance sheet like a vote of confidence and on its reputation like a defibrillator. For months, the deal lived in that corporate purgatory where everyone speaks in the future tense and the market politely pretends it can’t hear the lawyers. Now, the cash is in — and the shares exist.
The price has gotten more interesting with time, too. Nvidia’s $23.28-a-share buy-in is 36% below Intel’s prior Friday close — a reminder that when the market’s main character writes a check, it doesn’t overpay for the privilege.
Nvidia was off about 1.7% in early morning trading, and Intel was relatively flat (up just over 1%). That’s what happens when a headline becomes a filing. Intel got the money. Now: It has to make the partnership feel like hardware, not hope.
It’s a private placement, not a public-market nibble, and Intel’s earlier filing emphasized Nvidia wasn’t getting special governance or information rights beyond what shareholders already get. The deal was conditioned on the regulatory process, and the FTC’s early-termination notice for the transaction is dated Dec. 18 — early termination of the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period, the legal box-check that lets deals stop being “pending” and start being “done.”
“AI is driving a reinvention of every layer of the computing stack,” Huang said back in September at a press conference to discuss the news, which he called a “historic partnership” and a “great business opportunity” for both companies. Huang said the three architecture teams — working across the CPU architecture, as well as product lines for servers and PCs — have been developing this “fairly extensive” architecture for over a year. He added, “Today, we’re taking the next great step.”
You could feel how unthinkable this pairing once was by the way the Street talked about it. “This is truly like the Yankees and the Red Sox coming together to end their rivalry — the companies did not like each other whatsoever,” David Wagner, head of equity and a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, wrote at the time. “[Using Intel’s fabs to make chips is] a massive step in the right direction for U.S. chip designers and breathes new life into a poorly run company for decades.”