Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon speaks at the Computex forum in Taipei, Taiwan, June 3, 2024.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Qualcomm recently approached struggling chipmaker Intel about a takeover, CNBC has confirmed.
It wasn’t clear if Intel had engaged in conversations with Qualcomm or what the terms would be, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the information was confidential.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the matter. Intel shares initially popped on the news before closing up about 3%, while Qualcomm shares fell about 3% at the close.
The deal, if it were to happen, would be one of the largest technology mergers ever. Intel has a market cap of over $90 billion.
Once the world’s largest chipmaker, Intel has for years been in a downward spiral that accelerated in 2024. The stock had its biggest one-day drop in over 50 years in August after the company reported disappointing earnings. Intel shares are down 53% this year as investors express doubts about the company’s costly plans to manufacture and design chips.
Qualcomm and Intel compete in several markets, including for PC and laptop chips. However, Qualcomm, unlike Intel, doesn’t manufacture its own chips, and instead relies on firms such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung to handle production.
On Monday, after a board meeting to discuss strategy, Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger sent a memo to staff that reiterated the company’s commitment to investing heavily in its foundry business, a project that could cost $100 billion over the next five years. It also said that it was weighing outside investment.
Intel has also missed out on the artificial intelligence boom that’s captured the attention of Wall Street. Most of the advanced AI programs, such as ChatGPT, run on Nvidia graphics processors, instead of Intel central processors. Nvidia has more than 80% of the fast-growing market, according to analysts.
Qualcomm generates less revenue than Intel. It reported $35.8 billion in sales in fiscal 2023, compared with Intel’s $54.2 billion during the same period.
A potential deal would be complicated by antitrust and national security matters. Both Intel and Qualcomm do business in China, and both have seen deals scuttled by Chinese antitrust enforcers. Intel was unsuccessful with its attempted acquisition of Tower Semiconductor, as was Qualcomm in its bid to acquire NXP Semiconductor.
Other giant acquisitions in the space have also been scuttled. In 2017, Broadcom made a bid to buy Qualcomm for more than $100 billion. The Trump administration blocked the deal the following year on national security concerns, because Broadcom was based in Singapore at the time. And in 2021, the Federal Trade Commission sued to block Nvidia’s attempted purchase of Arm on antitrust grounds. The deal was called off in 2022 following additional pressure from regulators in Europe and Asia.
Representatives for Qualcomm and Intel declined to comment.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.
After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.
The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.
It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.
In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.
Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.
Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.
Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.
However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnicksaid in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.