Intel has best month ever, after years of losing to TSMC and Nvidia

Intel has been on an unprecedented winning streak since it became one of the first companies to go public on Nasdaq nearly 55 years ago. Shares of the chipmaker surged 114% in April, capping off its best month in history.

It’s been a long rally for Intel, which had its best two days ever in the past seven months, including a 24% surge on April 24 following a big earnings report. The stock rose to a record high that day for the first time since 2000 and continued to rise thereafter.

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

Wall Street seems convinced that the tide may be turning, with Intel’s latest 18A chips showing real promise as they roll out of the company’s new facility in Arizona.

At the same time, agency AI is driving a major revival in demand for Intel’s core product, the central processing unit. Bank of America predicts the CPU market will more than double by 2030, and Nvidia told CNBC in March that “CPUs are becoming the bottleneck for AI.”

“The CPU is re-establishing itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI ​​era,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said on the company’s earnings call last week, adding that demand for data center CPUs exceeds supply.

Tan was appointed CEO in March 2025, three months after Intel ousted Pat Gelsinger, whose four-year tenure was marred by turmoil. Intel’s shares are down 60% in 2024, its worst year ever. Since then, that figure has nearly quintupled, pushing Intel’s market cap to over $470 billion.

While Intel’s financials show signs of recovery, investors are going much further than fundamentals. Revenue rose more than 7% in the latest quarter, following declines in five of the previous seven periods.

But demand is materializing as Intel’s leading hyperscaler customers struggle for computing Google, Microsoft And Amazonas well as equipment manufacturers such as Dell, HP and Lenovo.

“CPUs are great again, and Intel isn’t making enough,” Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moor Insights, which has followed Intel for 35 years, told CNBC in an interview. “They sold out and were able to raise prices.”

Intel’s newest CPU for PCs, the Core Ultra Series 3, began shipping in January, while the latest Xeon 6+ data center CPUs debuted in March.

The stock’s rally began months ago after the U.S. government threw a lifeline to the struggling chipmaker by taking a 10% stake in the company in August, becoming its largest shareholder. The Trump administration’s $8.9 billion investment comes primarily from grants promised under the CHIPS Act that President Joe Biden signed in 2022.

President Trump congratulated Intel on its stock rally on Wednesday at Truth SocialHe said he was “proud of this Company” and described it as “a very good investment!” He described it as.

The government’s share of Intel is now over $40 billion.

Alongside leading players TSMC and Samsung, Intel is the only US-based chipmaker capable of producing the most advanced microchips needed to power artificial intelligence. Approximately 92% of the most advanced chips are produced in Taiwan; This concern has led both the Biden and Trump administrations to push to revive the critical industry.

Moorhead said TSMC and Samsung have factories in the United States but also have critical technology and intellectual property elsewhere, calling it a “structural risk.”

“That’s why the White House bought 10% of Intel,” Moorhead said.

Intel declined to be interviewed for this story.

Return of the foundry

Intel’s real turning point began years ago, when Gelsinger refocused on the manufacturing side of the business, known as the foundry. Unlike other chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, which outsource complex and expensive manufacturing of their silicon, Intel both designs and manufactures its own chips with the hope of manufacturing them for others.

Intel remains the foundry’s only major customer so far, as long-time TSMC customers have been hesitant to take this step.

Moorhead estimated that “75% of their valuation is related to the foundry and the promise of the foundry that they have yet to deliver on.”

Tan moved to relax some of Gelsinger’s aggressive efforts.

Intel laid off 15% of its workforce in July and canceled chip factory projects in Germany and Poland. Intel’s giant new chip factory in Ohio has been postponed to 2030, after initial plans to start production this year. “Over the past few years, the company invested too much, too early, without sufficient demand,” Tan wrote in a note about the layoffs.

In January, Tan began to change his mind, saying Intel had “taken a big step” into its next-generation technology, 14A. Tan said on last week’s earnings call that “multiple customers” were “actively evaluating the technology” and that the technology was being developed at a faster pace than 18A.

Intel’s only major external commitment to the foundry so far has come from 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 call, Musk said Tesla plans to use Intel’s upcoming 14A process to produce chips at the facility, which is intended to produce chips for use in Tesla’s vehicles and robots and in yet-to-be-built orbital data centers for SpaceX.

Moorhead said Musk’s announcement, while vague, was what made Intel shares “absolutely popular.”

In another sign of its renewed foundry strength, Intel this month announced it would buy back a 49% stake in its Irish chip plant for $14.2 billion. Intel sold Fab 34’s shares in Ireland to Apollo Global Management for $11.2 billion in 2024.

Advanced packaging

Intel’s other big play is advanced packaging, a lesser-known step of the chipmaking process that involves connecting individual chip dies into larger systems in increasingly complex ways. Intel’s EMIB packaging (embedded multi-die interconnect bridge) rivals TSMC’s leading CoWoS packaging technology.

Nvidia has reserved the majority of its CoWoS capacity at TSMC; This means advanced packaging will be the next bottleneck in AI chip making. As one of three companies that can make state-of-the-art packaging, Intel is well positioned to take advantage of tight supply.

Packaging was important when Intel’s shares soared after first-quarter earnings. CFO David Zinsner told CNBC that advanced packaging will save billions of dollars each year; he had previously estimated that figure to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Intel’s advanced packaging customers include: Amazon, Ciscoand a new commitment from SpaceX and Tesla.

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

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

Intel declined to comment on the matter.

Moorhead also noted that Nvidia is another possible packaging customer for Intel. “But I think TSMC will do everything they can to reduce this,” he said.

WRISTWATCH: How advanced packaging became the next bottleneck in manufacturing AI chips