Intel's stock soars more than 20% as chipmaker shows signs of a turnaround

Intel shares soared more than 20% on Friday as investors cheered signs of renewed growth due to mounting artificial intelligence demand.

The stock was up 22% as of early afternoon. Should it finish up more than 22.8%, which is how much the stock rallied on Sept. 18, it would be the best day for Intel since 1973.

CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took the helm early last year, has revived Wall Street interest in the struggling chipmaker by reeling in investments from the Trump administration and Nvidia, and by helping the company elbow its way into the AI boom, where it had previously been largely shut out.

"INTC's new CEO fixed the balance sheet, and is executing on a strategy that appears to have put INTC back on the competitive track," analysts at Evercore ISI wrote in a report after earnings, upgrading the shares to the equivalent of a buy rating.

Revenue topped estimates and rose 7.2% to $13.58 billion from $12.67 billion a year earlier. In five of the prior seven quarters, the company posted year-over-year declines in revenue. Intel also issued upbeat second-quarter guidance.

The rally on Wall Street marks a stark turnaround for the U.S. chipmaker, which lost 60% of its value in 2024, leading to the ouster of Pat Gelsinger as CEO in December of that year.

For years, the company largely sat out the AI race as it grappled with manufacturing delays and awaited a major customer for its chip fabrication business.

Some analysts are waiting to see promising yields of Intel's next-generation 14A manufacturing technology, planned for 2028 or beyond. After previously indicating Intel would wait for a major customer to emerge before moving forward with the expense of ramping to the newest technology, Tan said on X in January that Intel is "going big time into 14A."

Tan said on Thursday's earnings call that "multiple customers" are "actively evaluating the technology," and that its development is happening at a faster pace than Intel saw with its the 18A technology.

Intel's data center business is driving much of the current growth. Revenue jumped 22% from a year earlier to $5.1 billion, as AI fuels renewed demand for central processing units. CEO Tan called CPUs an "indispensable foundation of the AI era" on the earnings call.

Analysts at Citi upgraded the stock to a buy from a neutral rating, anticipating an uplift in CPU sales for all suppliers over the next few years.

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