Democrats want tighter limit on stock buybacks in chip subsidies, Bloomberg says

Democratic lawmakers, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, urged the U.S. Commerce Department to impose tougher rules to prevent semiconductor manufacturers from using new subsidies to enable stock buybacks, Bloomberg’s Jordan Fabian reports. The members of Congress want companies that accept money authorized by President Joe Biden’s Chips and Science Act to be restricted from engaging in stock buybacks for at least 10 years and to be barred from using government funding to directly or indirectly support buybacks, among other restrictions. The five largest US semiconductor companies – Intel (INTC), IBM (IBM), Qualcomm (QCOM), Texas Instruments (TXN), and Broadcom (AVGO) – spent $250 billion on buybacks between 2011 and 2020, according to a letter sent by eight lawmakers to the Commerce Department’s CHIPS program office. GlobalFoundries (GFS) is also among publicly traded companies in the space. Reference Link