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Nvidia, the world’s leading chipmaker, announced plans to invest $5bn in Intel and collaborate with the struggling semiconductor company on products.

One month after the Trump administration confirmed it had taken a 10% stake in Intel – the latest extraordinary intervention by the White House in corporate America – Nvidia said it would team up with the firm to work on custom data centers that form the backbone of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, as well as personal computer products.

Shares in Intel surged 29% during pre-market trading in New York. Nvidia rose almost 3%, bolstering its $4tn market value.

Nvidia said it will spend $5bn to buy Intel common stock at $23.28 a share. The investment is subject to regulatory approvals.

“This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem – a fusion of two world-class platforms,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. “Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.”

The two companies said they will work on “seamlessly connecting” their architectures.

For data centers, Intel will make custom chips that Nvidia will use in its AI infrastructure platforms. while for PCs products, Intel will build chips that integrate Nvidia technology.

The agreement provides a lifeline for Intel, which was a Silicon Valley pioneer that enjoyed decades of growth as its processors powered the personal computer boom, but fell into a slump after missing the shift to the mobile computing era unleashed by the iPhone’s 2007 debut.

Intel fell even farther behind in recent years amid the AI boom that’s propelled Nvidia into the world’s most valuable company. Intel lost nearly $19bn last year and another $3.7bn in the first six months of this year, and expects to slash its workforce by a quarter by the end of 2025.

Nvidia, meanwhile, has soared because its specialized chips are underpinning the artificial intelligence boom. The chips, known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, are highly effective at developing powerful AI systems.

Dan Ives, tech analyst at Wedbush, said: “With AI infrastructure investments continuing to grow with the company expecting between $3tn to $4tn in total AI infrastructure spend by the end of the decade, the chip landscape remains [Nvidia’s] world, with everybody else paying rent, as more sovereigns and enterprises wait in line for the most advanced chips in the world.”

Associated Press contributed reporting

By Brett Arends

The bond market is less confident than Jerome Powell

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell says inflation is under control.

“Rock solid.”

Those were the words of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday, when describing the apparent confidence of U.S. economists that the Fed is going to get inflation back under control.

Say what?

Read: Markets didn’t know which way to go after Wednesday’s Fed rate cut. Expect more volatility ahead.

Over on Wall Street, the bond market was sending a very different message. Fears that inflation is here to stay were already elevated and they got worse, not better, as Powell and his colleagues cut interest rates by a quarter-point and signaled two more cuts to come this year.

Going into the latest Fed meeting, bond markets were already predicting inflation would average 2.4% a year over the next five years, well above the Fed’s 2% target. After the meeting and Powell’s press conference, that expectation jumped above 2.5%.

The bond market’s five-year inflation expectations are now the highest since March, just before President Trump’s ill-fated “liberation day” tariff snafu sent the markets and investor confidence into a tailspin.

Even the latest economic projections produced by the Federal Reserve itself don’t pretend to see inflation coming back down to the official 2% target before 2028.

All of this is very ominous indeed for retirees and those who live on fixed incomes from their investments. Fixed incomes, including bonds, pensions and annuities, are most at risk from sustained inflation -although really high inflation, such as America saw in the 1970s, is bad for pretty much everything.

There are multiple reasons why the market may fear sustained inflation. Powell himself warned that, contrary to claims by some, the new tariffs being imposed on imports are not being paid by the exporting countries. They are instead being paid by the U.S. companies buying the imports, such as the retailers buying products from places like China to put on their shelves. And, he warned, those American companies will almost certainly be soon passing those costs on to you, the American consumer.

In the short term, at least, that’s the very definition of inflation: It raises prices.

Powell hinted at the risks of 1970s-style “stagflation,” a toxic combination of economic stagnation, high and rising unemployment, and persistent inflation. There were, he said, meaningful downside risks to the jobs market as well as upside risks to inflation.

But that isn’t all.

Inflation may also be the most obvious political solution to the massive and growing trajectory of the U.S. national debt – which private-sector economists, the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office have all said is unsustainable. Inflation has been the escape clause for spendthrift governments for millennia. It benefits the borrower, and steals from the lender, by reducing the value of the dollars they get back.

And hovering over it all is the threat that the Federal Reserve itself is about to lose much of the independence from the executive branch that it has enjoyed since the 1980s. Stephen Miran, President Trump’s appointee to the board, bucked his colleagues to vote for a half-point cut. The president wants short-term rates, currently just above 4%, cut to 1% or even lower.

This, regardless of rising fears of inflation on Wall Street.

America has had a strong Federal Reserve, largely independent of politicians, since Paul Volcker took over as chairman in 1979. It was Volcker who was finally able to ignore the politicians and crush the inflation of the ’70s by keeping short-term rates high enough for long enough to squeeze inflation out of the system.

Powell has consistently said he has taken that lesson to heart, and has been trying to do much the same thing in the past few years. President Trump has threatened to fire him, and is currently trying to fire Powell’s colleague Lisa Cook. (The excuse for the firing isn’t important, and looks increasingly absurd. This is about Fed independence.)

Bond investors may also fear the consequences of the recent turmoil at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – the official, supposedly nonpartisan agency that calculates the official inflation figures. President Trump fired the head of the agency last month after complaining about its figures.

All this uncertainty is making it increasingly difficult for retirees and those nearing retirement to plan their finances for their golden years. A 10-year U.S. Treasury note BX:TMUBMUSD10Y paying 4.05%, the current rate, looks like a very different proposition if you think inflation is going to average 2% over the next decade or if you think it is going to average 3% – or more.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that winners of a Powerball jackpot are given the option of taking their money in 30 installments that rise each year by 5%. That, surely, offers plenty of cushion against inflation, unless America becomes like Venezuela.

According to Immediate Annuities, a 65-year-old man who buys a lifetime-income annuity can secure a 7.9% annual payout if he takes a 0% annual cost-of-living increase – but a 4.54% annual payout with a 5% annual cost-of-living rise. (The numbers are slightly lower for women, to account for their longer life expectancy.)

The option is at least there.

-Brett Arends

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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  09-18-25 0959ET
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Two teenagers have been charged as part of a National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation into a cyber attack on Transport for London.

TfL suffered a major hack on 31 August last year, which investigators believe was carried out by members of the cyber-criminal group, Scattered Spider.

Thalha Jubair, 19, from east London, and Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall in the West Midlands, were arrested at their home addresses on Tuesday by the NCA and City of London Police.

Both appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court on Thursday afternoon charged with conspiring together to commit unauthorised acts against TfL, under the Computer Misuse Act.

When Mr Flowers appeared in court, he wore a grey hoodie with “off the grid” written on it. Mr Jubair sat next to him, wearing a black hoodie and black glasses.

Neither man spoke to each other during the proceedings.

Deputy Director Paul Foster, head of the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit, said: “Today’s charges are a key step in what has been a lengthy and complex investigation.

“This attack caused significant disruption and millions in losses to TfL, part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure.”

The hack disrupted TfL services for three months.

TfL wrote to around 5,000 customers to say there may have been unauthorised access to their personal information such as bank account numbers and sort codes.

Data including names, emails and home addresses had been accessed, TfL added.

Earlier this year, the NCA warned of an increasing threat from cyber criminal gangs based in the UK and other English-speaking countries, of which Scattered Spider is an example.