“Inter is going to be a rocket ship to $200,” that’s what Jim Cramer said about his favorite club stock on CNBC Tuesday morning. Up another 7.8% in the session, Intel was trading above its June 22 closing high of $140.95 per share. On this last day of the first half of this year, Intel is already up nearly 285%, making it the third-best performer on the S&P 500 in 2026. At $200 per share, it would be about 40% higher than current levels. Jim prefers Intel, even though he maintains the “I own it, I won’t trade it” designation over club heavyweight Nvidia. That’s because the company’s central processing units (CPUs) are currently a hot commodity in artificial intelligence. AI computing is moving from training to inference, especially in agent AI systems that can complete tasks autonomously. Training large-scale language models (LLMs) requires the power of Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which are increasingly being competed by custom chips. However, day-to-day use of agent systems requires large amounts of CPU to complete tasks. “CPUs have tremendous value,” Jim said at Tuesday’s morning meeting. Agent Era: “GPUs are better than GPUs and worth more.” Indeed, Nvidia relied on Arm Holdings’ chip architecture to get into CPUs. But Intel, and by extension Advanced Micro Devices, has been working on this for a long time. AMD is up 170% since the beginning of the year. Arm, the club’s name, makes money from royalties on its technology and releases its own chips, which are expected to rise nearly 230% in 2026. Intel’s chip manufacturing business also gives it an advantage. Jim said Intel’s foundry could be a major solution to the industry’s capacity shortage and could also meet President Donald Trump’s desire to bring advanced semiconductor manufacturing to the United States. Since acquiring Intel in March 2025, CEO Lip Vu Tan has made revitalizing the company’s once lagging foundry business a top priority. He is considered a national treasure by the White House. On June 18, President Trump said Intel had reached a deal with Apple to design and manufacture chips in the United States, but neither company confirmed that. Apple’s chips are manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of the world’s leading foundries. Intel’s rival TSMC is increasing its presence in the U.S. “All things considered, Intel is the number one stock in this market,” Jim said. (Jim Cramer’s charitable trusts are INTC, ARM, NVDA, AVGO; see here for a complete list of stocks.) As a subscriber to Jim Cramer’s CNBC Investment Club, you will receive trade alerts before Jim makes a trade. After Jim sends a trade alert, he waits 45 minutes before buying or selling stocks in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim talks about a stock on CNBC TV, he will issue a trade alert and then wait 72 hours before executing the trade. The above investment club information is subject to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, along with our disclaimer. No fiduciary duties or obligations exist or arise from your receipt of information provided in connection with the Investment Club. No specific results or benefits are guaranteed.
