They are buying the shares like any other investor, but the white house lied about that. Plenty of people just repeated Trump's Truth Social post which claimed: "The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars".

In reality, the US bought a 10% stake for roughly $8.9 billion, paying market price for the shares.

Best as I can tell, the weird, broken logic is "these funds were already allocated via the chips act and another act, but we axed that, so buying the shares instead is free".

So sure, no new funds, of which "free" is a nutty, insane interpretation, but whatever.

Weird ways to convey it aside, I do like shares as a guarantee for grants, which is not a new thing, but I'd still like to enforce funds allocation for those funds. Not sure if that's happening still.

Thanks for clarifying