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In August 2025, the Trump administration raised eyebrows by making a $8.9 billion investment in US chipmaker Intel, as part of a massive $100 billion drive to boost semiconductor supplies.

At first, it looked like an excellent investment as the AI race heated up as Intel saw shares shoot up, reaching just over $92 a share by Thursday of last week, more than quadrupling the government’s initial investment, as Yahoo Finance reports.

But by Friday, the situation looked dramatically different. Intel experienced its worst one-day stock performance since 1974, with shares cratering almost 30 percent on Friday alone. According to Yahoo, that means the value of the government’s 9.9 percent equity stake crashed from almost $40 billion to well under $30 billion, slicing over $11 billion in taxpayer-funded investment off its stake.

Intel’s shares are currently hovering at just over $60, well short of the “NOW $95” displayed in an AI slop image president Donald Trump shared of himself as a day trader in September.

The dramatic swing perfectly encapsulated why the government taking a major stake in a publicly traded company could result in investors being taken on a rollercoaster ride as the value of the Trump administration’s portfolio swings wildly.

Intel’s bruising Friday came after its shares had risen some 150 percent since the beginning of the year, cashing in on the seemingly limitless appetite for AI investments. But the company’s reported Q4 revenue outlook fell short of Wall Street expectations, triggering the major $150 billion market value wipeout.

Nonetheless, the chipmaker still managed to beat expectations in its third-quarter earnings report. The big elephant in the room was the personal computing industry, which has largely collapsed thanks to AI causing prices to skyrocket, suppressing consumer demand. Compounding its PC market woes are supply side production problems, as CNBC points out.

Investors are now divided on whether it’s time to buy the dip or wait it out as the stock swings drag on. Intel isn’t alone in feeling the hurt, with Google parent company Alphabet incurring massive losses and wiping out over half a trillion dollars in market value last week.

Zooming out, Big Tech is navigating a major point of reckoning as investors continue to ask hard questions about its ability to keep the party going and sustain its massive data center investments.

With existing supply woes, Intel is trapped between a rock and a hard place: either pursue a declining PC sector or make a major pivot to data center-friendly server processors, neither of which are a guarantee of future success.

Meanwhile, US taxpayers are along for the ride as the value of the Trump administration’s major investments in Intel continue to fluctuate wildly.

More on the AI industry: Investors Are Getting Palpably Nervous About the AI Industry’s Financial Situation

Hotel and resort giant Wyndham has acknowledged a cybersecurity incident after a good-faith security researcher discovered a bug that allowed anyone to access customers’ personal information.

Security researcher Robert Wiggins at What Security exclusively told TechCrunch that he found a password inside the source code of Wyndham’s Android app, which granted access to an internal company database, hosted by tech company Salesforce.

Wiggins told TechCrunch that the credential exposed personal information including customer names, email addresses, and Wyndham member number. The database also stores customer login tokens (called JWTs) that keep customers logged-in to their apps without having to repeatedly enter their own passwords. The database also contained Wyndham files and documents.

According to Wiggins, the database had millions of entries, but he was unable to determine an accurate number of exposed customer records. Wyndham touts some 129 million enrolled rewards members.

The researcher said Wyndham has no way to report security flaws, and asked for TechCrunch’s help in alerting the company. Soon after TechCrunch made contact with Wyndham’s cybersecurity staff, the exposed credential was revoked, preventing any further access to the database. 

“Our team has taken steps to address the issue,” a Wyndham spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Our security teams have no evidence of any unauthorized access,” the statement added, without providing any further details about the claim. 

Wyndham’s spokesperson would not say, when asked, whether the company had the technical means, such as server logs, to determine if anyone had access to the customer database prior to Wiggins’ discovery.

TechCrunch also asked Wyndham whether it planned to notify customers whose information was exposed, or disclose the incident to U.S. regulators, such as filing notice with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as public companies are required to do for material cybersecurity incidents. Wyndham would not say.

Wyndham’s spokesperson also would not say for how long the password was embedded in its customer app, or how Wyndham plans to ship a long-term fix for the app.

App and software developers generally avoid including passwords or credentials in publicly released software and apps — a process known as “hardcoding” — as anyone with a copy of the software can extract the password and use it to access its associated server or database. Given the simplicity with which credentials can be abused by anyone, many cases of hardcoded credentials are automatically scored with a maximum vulnerability severity rating.

For Wiggins, this is his second public discovery of hardcoded credentials in two weeks, after finding a near-identical vulnerability in Applebee’s app that exposed customer data. Wiggins relied on AI tools for both discoveries, which make it easier to identify simple security weaknesses, such as hardcoded credentials, by scouring thousands of lines of decompiled app code every second.

When asked about Wyndham’s response, Wiggins told TechCrunch that he was glad the company fixed the issue, but noted that without visibility into any past activity, someone with malicious intent could have leaked large amounts of customers’ personal information.

The company would not say whether it planned to set up a vulnerability disclosure program to allow outside security researchers and hackers to privately report security vulnerabilities. 

Michael Francess, Wyndham’s cybersecurity director who responded to the incident, told TechCrunch that researchers can alert [email protected] with details of potential security issues. The company’s spokesperson would not say say whether it plans to change its website to allow researchers to alert the company. 

This is the latest known security incident at Wyndham in recent years. In 2024, a security researcher found several Wyndham hotel check-in desks were running remote-access spyware that was leaking screenshots of guest records and booking information to the open web. 

Soon after our reporting, the spyware app found on the hotel computers, called pcTattletale, was hacked and its banks of customer data stolen, forcing the company’s owner, Bryan Fleming, to shut down the company. Fleming, a former resident of Michigan, was later arrested by federal authorities and convicted of making, selling, and advertising unlawful spyware.

Scientists have made a surprising discovery that could slash the amount of energy used in oil refining by eliminating part of the high-temperature heating process required to separate the fractions of crude oil.

The scientific breakthrough has found a simple and inexpensive way to separate crude oil molecules through a polymer membrane, radically different from previous attempts to fractionate crude oil via membranes.

In previous studies of membrane-based fractionations, scientists believed a selective layer should be coated onto the surface to help separate molecules.

But these additional-layer membranes are expensive to make and potentially defective when produced at scale.

So the researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Georgia Institute of Technology took a radically different approach. Instead of relying on an ultra-thin specialized coating, they passed crude oil directly through a bare porous polyacrylonitrile (PAN) membrane. This membrane is a chemically stable and inexpensive polymer commonly used as a support material in industrial membranes.

When the scientists had crude oil pass through the membrane, at room temperature, the membrane turned into a kind of clogged filter as heavy hydrocarbons selectively stuck to the pore walls. The accumulation of heavy hydrocarbons gradually narrowed the pores and created separation channels smaller than 2 nanometers, according to the study published in Nature this year.

The researchers showed that the bare PAN membrane delivered crude oil permeation rates approximately 23 times higher than those of previously reported state-of-the-art crude oil membranes while maintaining stable performance for 28 consecutive days.

“One of the key challenges facing membrane systems for crude oil separation was the low productivities of the membrane units – the PAN membranes with their surprising separation mechanism – dramatically increase the productivity of the membrane unit, to the point where industry should seriously consider adopting the technology,” said Professor Ryan Lively from Georgia Tech.

The new technology can be adopted by refineries with simple retrofits by adding a modular filtration unit that would not require massive investments, the researchers say.

These inexpensive membranes could materially lower the energy use and emissions from refining operations. The so-called “clogged filters” cannot replace distillation proper, but can be used at an early stage to separate fractions without the need to heat crude oil above 350 °C (662 F) from the very beginning, thus avoiding part of the energy use and emissions in the refining process.

Process simulations in the study showed that using the membrane as a pretreatment step before conventional distillation could reduce energy consumption by 31.6%, carbon dioxide emissions by 37.6%, cooling water usage by 20.7%, and operating costs by 36%.

The membrane could also be applied in other chemical separation processes in the petrochemicals and waste plastics recycling industries, according to the scientists. 

“Our goal is to precisely control this spontaneous pore-constriction phenomenon and develop it into a membrane platform applicable to the entire refining process,” said Dr. Jihoon Choi and Dr. Hyeokjun Seo of KAIST, the study’s co-first authors.

“We also aim to expand the technology to plastic recycling, biofuel purification, and other sustainable chemical processes that support carbon neutrality.”

This research is not the first time scientists have developed membranes that could reduce energy use in oil refining.

For example, engineers at MIT last year said they had developed a new approach to crude oil fractionation that could slash the amount of energy needed for processing the crude into different fuels by as much as 90% in a breakthrough that could revolutionize fuel production.

In a study published in the journal Science, the team at MIT revealed that it had developed a new filtration membrane that can efficiently separate heavy and light components from oil. The membrane is resistant to the swelling that tends to occur with other types of oil separation membranes.

MIT engineers modified polymers that have been used in water desalination by changing the bonds and introducing monomers.

“The key innovation is that the filters we developed can separate very small molecules at an atomistic length scale,” said Zachary P. Smith, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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