Paid a dividend for
32 years. Cut it
to zero in 2024.
Intel needs cash for the foundry bet. The dividend got cut. Buybacks got cut. New money came from the US government, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
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✦ The bottom line
FY2025: $0 in dividends paid (was $1.6B in 2024). $0 in buybacks. Capex slashed from $24B to $15B. The cash came from the US government ($5.7B), Nvidia ($5B), and SoftBank ($2B).
↓ the brief below
✦ Teach me
Why dividend cuts matter
A dividend is regular cash a company pays out to shareholders, usually quarterly. Mature companies pay them. Once a company starts paying a dividend, cutting it is one of the strongest possible signals that something has changed. Wall Street treats it as confession: "we need this cash more than you do."
Intel had paid a dividend since 1992 — through dot-com, through 2008, through the pandemic. Suspending it in 2024 was the loudest possible internal statement that the company is in turnaround mode.
Wall Street calls this
Dividend suspension
When Intel cut the dividend, they also cut the stock's appeal to *income-focused* investors (retirees, pension funds). The stock got cheaper. But the cash now goes into *building the new business* instead of going out the door.
Dividends paid · full year 2025
$0
Zero. Down from $1.60 billion paid to shareholders in 2024. The board suspended the dividend in August 2024 to preserve cash for the foundry buildout.
Suspending the dividend frees up ~$1.6B/year of cash. But the real money pit is capex — the cost of building chip factories. Intel has spent $24 billion of capex in 2024 alone, mostly on new fabs in Arizona, Ohio, Germany and Ireland. In 2025, with a new CEO and a sharper pencil, that number came down significantly.
Capital spending · full year 2025
$14.7
B
Down 38% from 2024's $23.9B. Intel cancelled the Germany fab expansion, cancelled the Poland assembly site, and slowed the Ohio fab. "Capital discipline" is Lip-Bu Tan's most-used phrase.
Cutting the dividend and cutting capex still wasn't enough cash to fund the foundry buildout. So in the second half of 2025, three major new shareholders showed up — and the most unusual one is the US government.
From the 10-K · three rescue investments in 2025
On August 22, 2025, we entered into a Warrant and Common Stock Agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce ... we received the full amount of the accelerated disbursements remaining under the commercial CHIPS Act agreement of $5.7 billion; we issued to the DOC 275 million shares of our common stock and a warrant ... On August 18, 2025 ... SoftBank Group ... $2.0 billion. On September 15, 2025 ... NVIDIA ... $5.0 billion.
↳ The US government is now a direct shareholder in Intel. So is Nvidia — Intel's biggest competitor in AI accelerators. So is SoftBank. Combined, that's $12.7B of new cash. The strings: keep majority ownership of Intel Foundry, or the government's warrant lets them buy 241M more shares at $20.
Source · 10-K · Significant Events — U.S. Government Agreements / Private Placement Share Sale Agreements · FY2025 · Filed Jan 30, 2026
⚠
Watch
Cut dividend, cut buybacks, cut capex by 38%. Got rescued by US government, NVDA, and SoftBank. Cash on hand is sufficient — but the runway is years, not decades.