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

Intel is on a winning streak unlike any since it became one of the first companies to go public on the Nasdaq nearly 55 years ago. The chipmaker’s stock soared 114% in April, closing out its best month on record.

It’s been an extended rally for Intel, which has enjoyed two of its best days ever in the last seven months, including a 24% jump on April 24, following a blowout earnings report. The stock rose to a record that day for the first time since 2000, and then continued to rise.

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

Wall Street appears convinced the tide may be turning, with Intel’s latest 18A chips showing real promise as they churn out of the company’s new Arizona plant.

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

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

Tan was tapped as CEO in March 2025, three months after Intel ousted Pat Gelsinger, whose four-year tenure was marred by turmoil. Intel’s stock plummeted 60% in 2024, its worst year ever. Since then, it’s almost quintupled, lifting Intel’s market cap past $470 billion.

While Intel’s financials are showing signs of recovery, investors are getting way out ahead of fundamentals. Revenue in the latest quarter rose more than 7% after declines in five of the prior seven periods.

But demand is materializing, driven by a scramble for compute by Intel’s major hyperscaler customers Google, Microsoft and Amazon, as well as equipment manufacturers such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. 

“CPUs are cool again and Intel can’t make enough,” Moor Insights CEO Patrick Moorhead, who’s been covering Intel for 35 years, told CNBC in an interview. “They’re sold out and they were able to raise prices.”

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

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

President Trump congratulated Intel on the stock rise Wednesday on Truth Social, saying he was “very proud of that Company” and calling it “such a good investment!”

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

Intel is the only U.S.-based chipmaker capable of manufacturing the most advanced microchips needed to power AI, next to leading players TSMC and Samsung. Some 92% of the most advanced chips are made in Taiwan, a concern that led both the Biden and Trump administrations to push for reshoring the critical industry.

Moorhead said TSMC and Samsung have factories in the U.S. but they have critical technology and intellectual property elsewhere, which he called a “structural risk.”

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

Intel declined an interview for this story.

Foundry comeback

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

So far, Intel remains the only major customer of its foundry as longtime TSMC customers are hesitant to make the leap.

Moorhead estimated that “75% of their valuation is about foundry and the promise of foundry, which they have not delivered on yet.”

Tan has moved to unwind some of Gelsinger’s aggressive efforts.

Intel slashed 15% of its workforce in July and canceled chip fab projects in Germany and Poland. In Ohio, Intel’s giant new chip fab is delayed until 2030, after initial plans had it starting production this year. Tan wrote in a memo about the layoffs that, “Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand.” 

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

Intel’s only major outside commitment for foundry so far came from Elon Musk. Intel announced earlier this month that it will be joining Musk’s Terafab chip complex in Austin, Texas, to help “design, fabricate, 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 forthcoming 14A process to produce chips at the facility, which is meant to make chips for use in Tesla’s vehicles and robots, and in yet-to-be-constructed orbital datacenters for SpaceX.

Moorhead said Musk’s announcement, even if vague, is what made Intel stock “absolutely pop.”

In another sign of renewed foundry strength this month, Intel announced it would repurchase a 49% equity stake of its Ireland chip facility for $14.2 billion. Intel sold the stake of its Fab 34 in Ireland to Apollo Global Management in 2024 for $11.2 billion.

Advanced packaging 

Intel’s other major play is advanced packaging, a lesser-known step of the chipmaking process that involves individual chip dies being connected to larger systems with increasingly complex methods. Intel’s EMIB packaging — embedded multi-die interconnect bridge — rivals TSMC’s leading CoWoS packaging technology.

Nvidia has reserved the majority of CoWoS capacity at TSMC, meaning advanced packaging is set to become the next bottleneck in AI chipmaking. As one of only three companies that can do the most advanced packaging, Intel is well positioned to take advantage of the constrained supply.

When Intel’s stock jumped after first-quarter earnings, packaging was key. CFO David Zinsner told CNBC that advanced packaging will bring in billions of dollars each year, after previously estimating that figure would be in the hundreds of millions. Intel’s advanced packaging customers include Amazon, Cisco, and the new commitment from SpaceX and Tesla.

Google said in April it would continue using Intel chips in its AI data centers, but the internet giant may also use Intel for advanced packaging. Google makes its own custom AI accelerators called tensor processing units (TPUs), and reports suggest its forthcoming 8th generation of the chip could be packaged on Intel’s EMIB technology.

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

Intel declined to comment on the matter.

Moorhead also pointed to Nvidia as another likely packaging customer that will come to Intel eventually. “But I think TSMC is going to do anything they possibly can to curtail that,” he said.

WATCH: How advanced packaging became the next bottleneck for making AI chips