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Intel venture arm’s China tech stakes raises alarm in Washington

Published

2 years ago

July 16, 2024

Intel venture arm’s China tech stakes raises alarm in Washington

Intel’s venture capital arm has emerged as one of the most active foreign investors in Chinese artificial intelligence and semiconductor start-ups, at a time the $147bn chipmaker receives billions of dollars from Washington to fund a technological arms race with Beijing.

Intel Capital owns stakes in 43 China-based technology start-ups, according to an FT analysis of its portfolio. Since the venture fund was launched in the early 1990s, it has invested in more than 120 Chinese groups, according to data provider Crunchbase.

The fund, which invests off the chipmaker’s balance sheet, has continued to back fledgling Chinese companies in the past year, even as many of its American peers exited the market under pressure from US authorities.

In February Intel Capital invested in a $20mn fundraising round by Shenzhen-based AI-Link, a 5G and cloud infrastructure platform, and last year led a $91mn round for Shanghai-headquartered North Ocean Photonics, a maker of micro-optics hardware.

Rising geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing have led to greater scrutiny of private investment flows between the two economic powers as they jostle for technological and military supremacy.

In June, the Biden administration unveiled rules to curb US financing for Chinese technology that could have military purposes, such as AI, quantum computing and semiconductors. The regulations are expected to be finalised this year.

Intel Capital’s “investments were poster children that helped build consensus for the outbound restrictions”, according to one person familiar with the Biden administration’s thinking on the new rules.

Its current investments in China include around 16 AI start-ups and 15 in the semiconductor industry, as well as companies developing cloud services, electric vehicles, telecoms, virtual reality systems and batteries.

Intel Capital may be forced to divest from some companies once the US regulations take effect, though the US Treasury is examining whether to include some exemptions for some venture capital transactions.

However, the US group has slowed down its dealmaking in China over the past 18 months, according to data provider ITjuzi, completing just three deals since the start of 2023. Investment controls and a slowdown in the Chinese economy, as well as lasting repercussions from Beijing’s crackdown on tech companies, have hit start-up valuations and viability.

A report by a US House China committee on the Chinese Communist party in February said that American venture capital firms had invested billions of dollars into companies that were fuelling China’s “military, surveillance state and Uyghur genocide”. This includes funnelling $1.9bn into AI companies and a further $1.2bn into semiconductors.

The report singled out five US venture firms — Sequoia, GGV, GSR Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Walden International — but did not mention Intel Capital, despite the fund becoming one of the largest US investors in China after the departure of some of its rivals.

Intel Capital is “way more active” than Qualcomm’s venture arm in China, said the head of a large US fund with a long history of doing business in China. “Intel is active in everything.”

John Moolenaar, Republican head of the House China committee, said the case highlighted the need for tighter regulation.

“The Chinese Communist party remembers the old communist slogan that ‘the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them’,” said Moolenaar. “We need strong outbound capital restrictions to prevent American firms from investing in companies closely tied to the CCP’s armed forces.”

Intel Capital declined to comment.

Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital, two of the largest US venture investors in China, spun out their Chinese businesses last year amid the mounting political pressure. Qualcomm, Walden and GSR also continue to invest in Chinese start-ups.

In March Intel received about $20bn in grants and loans from the US to fund an expansion of its semiconductor factories, the largest award from the government’s 2022 Chips and Science Act designed to enhance the domestic chip industry. The package will support more than $100bn in US investments from Intel for advanced chipmaking facilities, including building mega-plants in Ohio and Arizona.

Nasdaq-listed Intel has a large China business, where it employs around 12,000 people and accounted for 27 per cent of global revenue in 2023.

Chinese multinational Lenovo is one of the three largest customers of its chips, alongside Dell and HP, generating 11 per cent of global revenue. Last month, Intel’s China arm acquired a 3 per cent stake in Shenzhen telecoms equipment maker Luxshare.

Intel Capital’s China business is run by Tianlin Wang, a life-long Intel employee and head of the unit since 2017. It has six other investment directors in the country. Globally, Intel Capital has invested more than $20bn since the early 1990s and is led by Anthony Lin in San Francisco.

Intel Capital has participated in Chinese start-up deals worth a total $1.4bn since 2015, according to data from PitchBook. That figure relates to the total value of the deals rather than Intel Capital’s individual contribution, which the firm does not make public.

As early as 2014, Intel Capital announced it had invested $670mn in more than 110 Chinese technology companies, and in 2015 alone it gave $67mn to eight Chinese tech companies. Since then, Intel Capital has not publicly revealed the scale of its investments in China.

A report in February 2023 by the US Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a DC think-tank, into the national security risks associated with US investment in Chinese AI companies, found that Intel Capital participated in 11 deals for such companies between 2015 and 2021. A person close to Intel said there were only four AI deals during this time.

In some cases, the US fund obtained a board seat, such as at Horizon Robotics, a chipmaker, and Eeasy Tech, which designs AI chips for facial recognition and that was also backed by the Zhuhai provincial government.

“Intel Capital’s investments in Chinese AI firms have led to the formation of strategic collaborations that could benefit the Chinese companies in a way that complements Chinese government strategies,” that report said.

In one case, Intel Capital helped fund the creation of a Chinese company that was later sanctioned by the US. The fund was one of the earliest investors in AI voice recognition group iFlytek, acquiring a 3 per cent stake in 2002 before selling the shareholding two years later. The company was one of six Chinese companies banned by the US in 2019 for their roles in alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

“The fear of missing out in the AI era has created a sense of urgency for Intel Capital,” said the head of a rival Chinese venture firm that has co-invested alongside them. “Intel is under such fierce competition in AI in the US, they can’t afford to be left behind, so they have to look around the world for where to deploy money into AI and China is one of the very few options.”

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A New Worry for Republicans: Latino Catholics Offended by Trump

Published

8 hours ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

A New Worry for Republicans: Latino Catholics Offended by Trump

When Stuart Sepulvida arrives at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Parish in Tucson, Ariz., for Mass, which he attends most mornings, he passes a display honoring local soldiers and encouraging parishioners to pray for their safety. Hundreds of small cards record their names: Robles, Arenas, Grajeda. A portrait of Pope Leo XIV hangs across the lobby.

Mr. Sepulvida, 81, is a Vietnam veteran whose patriotism and Catholicism are deeply intertwined. He voted for President Trump three times but has never felt more betrayed by an American president than when Mr. Trump denounced Pope Leo as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”

“It was very disturbing to me to hear both of them clashing like they did,” Mr. Sepulvida said, standing outside the church one morning this week. Now, he is reconsidering whether he will vote Republican this year.

The Republican Party is struggling to hold onto the support from Hispanic voters who helped propel Mr. Trump back into the White House in 2024. Yet as many party leaders have acknowledged the urgent need to stop the backsliding among Latinos, the president has enraged many of even his strongest supporters by clashing with the pope.

On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, spoke of the need to “abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars.” Within days, Mr. Trump, who has led the United States into a war with Iran, said the pope was “catering to the radical left” and posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a Jesus figure. Mr. Trump later deleted the image, saying he thought it depicted him as a doctor.

“It just isn’t what a president should do,” Mr. Sepulvida said. “The pope speaks for his people. He is beyond politics.”

Mr. Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, compared to 43 percent who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. The most sizable gains came from Hispanic Catholics. While Joseph R. Biden Jr. won their votes by a 35-point margin in 2020, the Democratic advantage shrunk to 17 points in 2024. Now, just 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they support most or all of President Trump’s agenda, according to a poll from Pew released earlier this year.

If the president’s quarrel with the pope sours more Latinos on the Republican Party, it could affect midterm races across the country, including in South Florida and South Texas, where Republicans have notched important victories in predominantly Hispanic districts in recent years.

In Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from north of Tucson to the Mexican border, voters were still grappling with the fallout this week.

The district is roughly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Nearly a third of the district is Hispanic, and there is a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as a large Catholic community with deep history in the region. It also has one of largest numbers of military veterans of all congressional districts in the country.

“The president is looking for a lot of attention from everything,” said Maria Ramos, 60, who regularly attends weekday Mass at St. Francis. A registered independent, she usually votes for Democrats but often declines to cast a ballot if she views a candidate as too liberal. “He believes he can put God in his place. He’s meddling in countries that he’s not in control of — he wants to control the world.”

“It is not just a very serious lack of respect — it is a mortal sin,” she said, shaking her head. One word comes to her mind again and again, she said: disgust.

Like so many others in southern Arizona, Ms. Ramos has several relatives who serve in the military — a path they saw to both serve the country and as an entry into the stable middle class. Many of them, she said, voted for Mr. Trump for president.

The Tucson district is now widely seen as one of the most competitive in the country. Republican Juan Ciscomani narrowly won the district in 2022, in part by emphasizing his biography as a Mexican immigrant and a devoted father of six children. He is also an evangelical Christian, a group that has driven much of the growth among Hispanic Republican voters in recent years.

Mr. Ciscomani declined a request for an interview, but when a local radio host asked Mr. Ciscomani what he thought of Mr. Trump’s comments “as a man of faith,” the congressman declined to criticize the president but said, “You can trust that you won’t see any meme like that coming out of my account.”

JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat challenging Mr. Ciscomani this fall, has made her 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and Marines a key aspect of her story on the campaign trail. While she rarely speaks about her religious background and no longer considers herself a practicing Catholic, she said she briefly considered becoming a nun as a teenager. She criticized Mr. Ciscomani for not condemning the president’s remarks.

“You can’t make faith a central part of your campaign and then allow this to stand,” she said in an interview.

Across Tucson, Latino Catholics, regardless of their past voting preferences, were similarly quick to condemn the president’s remarks.

When Cecilia Taisipic, 71, heard about it, she said, she winced with shame about her vote for him in 2024.

“I thought he would make the country better, but apparently it’s the opposite,” she said as she left Mass at St. Francis earlier this week. She is so fed up with politics, she said, that she is unlikely to vote at all this year. “When it comes to my faith, I don’t like anybody to challenge it. Now I don’t want to hear anything on the news. I just want to pray.”

Matilde Robinson Bours, 63, teaches a weekly Spanish Bible study class at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, and like nearly all of the women in her class, she immigrated from Mexico decades ago. She has voted for Republicans in nearly every election since she became a citizen. Though she has never liked President Trump, she said, his comments about the pope enraged her more than anything else he has said or done in the past.

“This surpassed everything, every social and political norm — this is personal to all Catholics,” she said. “The arrogance and ego is disgusting. To think that he is God? The pope has every right and responsibility to talk about peace.”

Still, Ms. Robinson Bours said, nothing will stop her from supporting Republicans again this year. She has been delighted that her adult children have stopped supporting Democrats in recent elections.

“Almost everyone I know thinks the way I do,” she said.

Patricia Martinez, 86, who has attended the same Bible study as Ms. Robinson Bours for years, shook her head in disagreement. She said she cannot imagine voting for a Republican who supports Mr. Trump.

“This is different — this shows he is out of his mind,” said Ms. Martinez. “We have to have basic respect and teach that to people in this country.”

Patrick Robles, a 24-year-old native of Tucson, spent years alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, but returned to his faith more recently. “The craziness of the world sort of caused me to seek some sort of answers,” he said. Now, he attends Mass at the St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the office where he works as an aide to Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.

Mr. Robles said he saw Mr. Trump’s battle with the pope as both a personal affront and a political opportunity.

“The president is basically trying to draw a line between Catholics and what we perceive to be patriotism,” he said. “I believe we can be both.”

Last week, he texted one of his uncles who has supported Mr. Trump in every election asking him what he thought.

“I’m afraid we need divine intervention,” the uncle replied.

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After 2 failed votes, Mike Johnson unveils new plan to extend key U.S. spy powers

Published

11 hours ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

After 2 failed votes, Mike Johnson unveils new plan to extend key U.S. spy powers

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions at a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

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J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., is forging ahead with his latest proposal to renew a key American spy power. His bill, revealed Thursday, is largely unchanged from a previous plan which failed in a series of overnight votes earlier this month.

The program at center of the debate, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is set to expire on April 30.

FISA 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside of the United States. Some of the nearly 350,000 foreign targets whose communications are collected under the provision are in touch with Americans, whose calls, texts and emails could end up in the trove of information available to the federal government for review.

For almost two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers from both parties have sought to require specific court approval before federal law enforcement can conduct a targeted review of an American’s information gathered through the program. The lack of any such warrant requirement helped sink an effort last week to extend the program for 18 months, as well as a separate vote on a five-year renewal.

Trump officials, like those in past administrations, have argued that such a warrant requirement would overburden law enforcement and endanger national security. Johnson’s latest proposal would reauthorize the program for three years, but does not include a warrant requirement. Instead, the bill calls for the FBI to submit monthly explanations for reviews of Americans’ information to an oversight official as well as criminal penalties for willful abuse, among other tweaks.

“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social last week, advocating for the program to be extended without changes. “I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect.”

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., and fellow Republicans celebrate GOP tax policies at an event outside the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, April 15, 2026.

Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the Obama and first Trump administration, says Johnson’s reforms look like an attempt to find a middle ground.

“There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” Gerstell said. “It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise that is going to be satisfactory to the national security agencies and yet at the same time represents some gesture to the privacy advocates.”

“This is not a reform bill and it’s not a compromise,” Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, wrote on X. “It’s a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”

A bipartisan reform deal is still out of reach

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told NPR on Wednesday, before the release of Johnson’s new proposal, that lawmakers were working on a bipartisan solution. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., was in touch with Johnson on the issue.

“There’s a lot of work being done here,” Himes said. “We’re sort of working out a process that will be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Himes said he was negotiating with Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional law scholar, on a reform proposal they hoped could preserve and reform the program — reauthorizing it with bipartisan support.

But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of the inclusive approach Himes hoped for.

NPR obtained a memo written by Raskin to his colleagues urging them to oppose the bill, which he said “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”

“FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge,” Raskin wrote.

FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally barred from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.

Republican hardliners — who sunk Johnson’s last reauthorization attempt — also don’t all appear to be on board for Johnson’s latest revision. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a past chair of the Freedom Caucus, said “we’re not there yet” in a video he shared to X on Thursday.

“I didn’t take an oath to defend FISA, I didn’t take an oath to defend the intelligence community,” Perry said. “We can’t have them spying on American citizens and, when they do, there has to be accountability and I haven’t seen any that I’m satisfied with yet.”

The House Rules committee meets Monday morning, the first step toward advancing the renewal bill toward a vote.

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Trump Says Israel and Lebanon Agree to Extend Cease-Fire by Three Weeks

Published

20 hours ago

April 23, 2026

Press Room

Trump Says Israel and Lebanon Agree to Extend Cease-Fire by Three Weeks

President Trump announced a three-week extension of a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon that had been set to expire in a few days, after hosting a meeting between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats at the White House on Thursday.

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that has been attacking Israel from southern Lebanon, did not have representatives at the meeting and did not immediately comment on the announcement. The prime minister of Israel and the president of Lebanon also did not comment.

A successful peace agreement would hinge upon Hezbollah halting attacks, which Lebanon’s government has little power to enforce because it does not control the militia. Lebanon’s military has mostly stayed out of the fighting and is not at war with Israel.

The cease-fire, which was scheduled to end on April 26, would last until May 17 if it takes effect as Mr. Trump described it. Before the cease-fire was brokered last week, nearly 2,300 people were killed in Lebanon and 13 in Israel. Since then, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks have been dramatically reduced, though the two sides have continued exchanging fire.

The Lebanese Ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh, credited Mr. Trump for extending the cease-fire, saying that “with your help and support, we can make Lebanon great again.” Mr. Trump replied, “I like that phrase, it’s a good phrase.”

Asked about the potential of a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, Mr. Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.”

But Lebanon and Israel have periodically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon for the fifth time since 1978, incursions that have destabilized the country and the delicate balance of power between Muslim, Christian and Druze communities.

In the hours before the president’s announcement on social media, Israel and Hezbollah were trading attacks in southern Lebanon, testing the existing cease-fire.

Mr. Trump said the meeting at the White House had been attended by high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.

Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Hezbollah claimed three separate attacks on Israeli troops who are occupying southern Lebanon, though none were wounded or killed.

Hezbollah set off the latest round of fighting last month by attacking Israel soon after the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks by launching airstrikes across Lebanon and widening a ground invasion of the country’s south.