The White House wanted to make money from 2 chip companies. Nearly a year later, it hasn't gotten a cent.

President Donald Trump wants the U.S. government to get a slice of private sector profits as it tries to boost key industries like semiconductors and artificial intelligence, arguing the American people should benefit.

"There's so much money and it's so big that there are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public," the president said recently of AI.

But the administration's interventions in tech companies over the past year underscore how difficult that will be to accomplish.

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the federal government has taken an aggressive approach to industrial policy, negotiating stock ownership or profit-sharing agreements with at least 19 companies. None have yielded returns, either because the government hasn't issued regulations to transfer the profits or because it would require selling stock that the administration wants to hold onto as it tries to prop up specific companies.

"They haven't made a penny off of any of this stuff yet," said Scott Lincicome, the vice president of general economics at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. "They keep saying they're going to, but it really only works under a scenario that, at this point, is highly speculative, if not unlikely."

The lack of a financial return undermines a key justification for the Trump administration's unprecedented efforts to intervene in private companies, which are fundamentally shifting the relationship between the public and private sectors.

Take the deals the Commerce Department struck last summer with chipmakers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to sell some of their less advanced chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent cut of the sales. According to the two companies' recent reports to shareholders, that would entitle the government to about $63 million between August and December of 2025.

But as both companies underscored in their most recent shareholder reports, the administration has yet to issue the necessary regulations to codify the profit-sharing arrangement amid questions about their legality. As a result, the government hasn't earned a cent from those deals, nearly a year later.

Any effort to take a share of the companies' products would likely face legal challenges — experts point to language in the Constitution that expressly prohibits putting taxes or duties on exports from any state.

But a trade lawyer close to the Trump administration said the hold-up isn't due to legal questions, per se.

"I wouldn't assume the absence of a 15 percent charge reflects a legal obstacle," said the lawyer, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "It may simply reflect a strategic judgment that other tools are producing better results."