Intel had its best month ever after years of losing to TSMC and Nvidia

Intel has enjoyed an unparalleled winning streak since becoming one of the first companies to list on the Nasdaq nearly 55 years ago. The company’s stock soared 114% in April, completing its best month ever.

For Intel, it was a huge rally. Intel has enjoyed two of its best days ever in the past seven months, including a 24% rise on April 24 following an explosive earnings report. On that day, stock prices hit a record high for the first time since 2000, and have continued to rise ever since.

Intel is in the midst of a turnaround after years of delayed launches and disappointing yields left it far behind manufacturing giant Taiwan Semiconductor and chipmaker Nvidia in the race to power artificial intelligence.

Wall Street appears convinced that the tide is turning, with Intel’s latest 18A chips rolling out of a new Arizona factory showing real promise.

At the same time, agent AI is significantly reviving demand for central processing units, Intel’s core product. Bank of America predicts the CPU market could more than double by 2030, and Nvidia told CNBC in March that “CPUs have become the bottleneck” for AI.

“CPUs are re-establishing themselves as the essential foundation of the AI ​​era,” Intel CEO Lip Vu Tan said in an earnings call last week, adding that demand for data center CPUs exceeds supply.

Tan was named CEO in March 2025, three months after Intel fired Pat Gelsinger, whose four-year tenure was marred by turmoil. Intel’s stock price plummeted 60% in 2024, making it the worst year on record. Since then, that amount has nearly quintupled, giving Intel a market capitalization of more than $470 billion.

Intel’s financial situation is showing signs of recovery, but investors are getting ahead of the company’s fundamentals. Revenue rose more than 7% in the most recent quarter, after declining in five of the past seven quarters.

But demand is starting to materialize as Intel’s major hyperscaler customers compete for compute. google, microsoft and AmazonThe same goes for equipment manufacturers such as . Dell, HP And Lenovo.

Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moor Insights, who has covered Intel for 35 years, said in an interview with CNBC that “CPUs are cool again, but Intel is not making enough money.” “Since it was sold out, we were able to raise the price.”

Intel’s latest PC CPUs, the Core Ultra Series 3, went on sale in January, and the latest Xeon 6+ data center CPUs hit the market in March.

The stock price rally began several months ago, when the U.S. government gave the ailing semiconductor maker a lifeline in August by acquiring a 10% stake in the company and becoming its largest shareholder. The Trump administration’s $8.9 billion investment comes primarily from grants promised under the CHIPS Act, signed into law in 2022 by President Joe Biden.

President Trump congratulated Intel on its rise in stock price on Truth Social on Wednesday, saying he was “very proud of that company” and called it “a very good investment!”

The government’s stake in Intel is now worth more than $40 billion.

Intel is the only U.S.-based chipmaker behind giants TSMC and Samsung that can produce the cutting-edge microchips needed to power AI. Approximately 92% of cutting-edge chips are manufactured in Taiwan, and concerns about this led the Biden and Trump administrations to push for a return to the key industry.

Moorhead said that while TSMC and Samsung have factories in the United States, their critical technology and intellectual property is located elsewhere, which he called a “structural risk.”

“This is why the White House bought 10% of Intel,” Moorhead said.

Intel declined to be interviewed for this article.

Foundry Comeback

Intel’s real turning point began a few years ago, when Mr. Gelsinger renewed his focus on the manufacturing side of the business, known as the foundry. Unlike fellow chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, which outsource the manufacturing of their complex and expensive silicon, Intel both designs and manufactures its own chips and expects to make them for other companies as well.

So far, Intel remains the foundry’s only major customer, as TSMC’s longtime customers are hesitant to jump in.

Moorhead estimated that “75% of their valuation is in terms of foundries and foundry promises, which they haven’t delivered on yet.”

Mr. Tan is working to soften some of Mr. Gelsinger’s aggressive efforts.

Intel cut 15% of its workforce in July and canceled chip manufacturing projects in Germany and Poland. In Ohio, Intel’s huge new chip factory was originally scheduled to begin production this year, but has been delayed until 2030. “Over the past few years, the company has invested too much too quickly and without sufficient demand,” Tan wrote in a memo about the layoffs.

In January, Tan began to change his tune, saying Intel was “very committed” to its next-generation technology, 14A. Tan said on an earnings call last week that “multiple customers” are “actively evaluating this technology” and it is being developed at a faster pace than 18A.

To date, Intel’s only major outside involvement in foundries has been through Elon Musk. Intel announced earlier this month that it would join Musk’s Terafab chip complex in Austin, Texas, to help “design, manufacture, and package ultra-high performance chips at scale” for SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla.

During Tesla’s first-quarter earnings conference, Musk said Tesla plans to use Intel’s upcoming 14A process to produce chips at the facility, which is intended to make chips for use in Tesla vehicles and robots, as well as SpaceX’s yet-to-be-built orbital data center.

Moorhead said Musk’s announcement, even if vague, “absolutely sent Intel stock skyrocketing.”

This month, in another sign of its new foundry power, Intel announced it would buy back a 49% stake in an Irish chip facility for $14.2 billion. Intel sold its stake in Ireland’s Fab 34 to Apollo Global Management for $11.2 billion in 2024.

advanced packaging

Another major focus for Intel is advanced packaging. This is a little-known step in the chip manufacturing process that requires individual chip dies to be connected to larger systems in increasingly complex ways. Intel’s EMIB packaging (embedded multi-die interconnect bridge) is comparable to TSMC’s leading CoWoS packaging technology.

Nvidia has secured most of TSMC’s CoWoS capabilities. This means that advanced packaging will become the next bottleneck in AI chip manufacturing. As one of only three companies with cutting-edge packaging capabilities, Intel is well-positioned to take advantage of limited supply.

When Intel’s stock price soared after its first-quarter results, packaging was key. CFO David Zinsner told CNBC that advanced packaging would bring in billions of dollars in profits each year, after previously estimating the number to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Intel’s Advanced Packaging customers include: Amazon, Ciscoand new initiatives from SpaceX and Tesla.

Google announced in April that it would continue to use Intel chips in its AI data centers, and the internet giant may also use Intel for advanced packaging. Google is manufacturing its own custom AI accelerators called tensor processing units (TPUs), and there are reports that its upcoming 8th generation chips could be packaged with Intel’s EMIB technology.

“I think Google will be packaging with Intel within 18 months,” Moorhead said.

Intel declined to comment on the matter.

Moorhead also pointed to Nvidia as another packaging customer that could eventually come to Intel. “But I think TSMC is going to do whatever it can to curb it,” he said.

WATCH: How advanced packaging became the next bottleneck for AI chip manufacturing