Intel has the best month, after years of losses to TSMC and Nvidia

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

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

Intel is in the midst of a turnaround after years of launch delays and disappointing yields saw it trail manufacturing leader Taiwan Semiconductor and chipmaker Nvidia in the race to power artificial intelligence.

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

At the same time, the agent’s AI is investigating a major resurgence in demand for Intel’s main product, the central processing unit. Bank of America predicts that 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 repositioning itself as the key foundation of the AI ​​era,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said on the company’s earnings call last week, adding that demand for its data center CPUs is outstripping supply.

Tan was named CEO in March 2025, three months after Intel fired Pat Gelsinger, whose four-year tenure was marred by turmoil. Intel stock is down 60% in 2024, its worst year ever. Since then, it has almost quintupled, increasing Intel’s previous market to $470 billion.

While Intel’s financials are showing signs of recovery, investors are finding a way to get out ahead of the curve. Revenue in the latest quarter rose more than 7% after falling in five of the previous seven quarters.

But the demand is happening, driven by the computing frenzy by Intel’s biggest hyperscaler customers Google, Microsoft again Amazonand equipment manufacturers such as Dell, HP and Lenovo.

“CPUs are cool again and Intel can’t do enough,” Moor Insights CEO Patrick Moorhead, who has covered Intel for 35 years, told CNBC in an interview. “They were sold until they were able to increase the prices.”

Intel’s latest CPU for PCs, the Core Ultra Series 3, went on sale in January, while its new Xeon 6+ data center CPUs hit the market in March.

The stock’s rally began months ago, after the US government bailed out the struggling manufacturer in August by taking a 10% stake in the company and becoming a major 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’s rise Wednesday on Truth Social, saying he’s “very proud of that Company” and calling it “such a great investment!”

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

Intel is the only US chipmaker capable of making the most advanced microchips needed to power AI, alongside leading players TSMC and Samsung. About 92% of the most advanced chips are made in Taiwan, a concern that has led the Biden and Trump administrations to push to restore the critical industry.

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

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

Intel declined an interview for this story.

Return of the Foundry

Intel’s real turnaround began years ago when Gelsinger put a renewed focus on the manufacturing side of the business, known as the Foundry. Unlike other chip makers Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, which outsource the complex and expensive production of their silicon, Intel both designs and manufactures its own chips – with the hope of producing others as well.

So far, Intel remains its founder’s only major customer as TSMC’s long-time customers are reluctant to defect.

Moorhead estimated that “75% of their valuation is about the foundation and the promise of the foundation, which they haven’t fulfilled yet.”

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

Intel cut 15% of its workforce in July and canceled chip fab projects in Germany and Poland. In Ohio, Intel’s new chip fab has been delayed until 2030, after initial plans to start production this year. Tan wrote in a memo about the layoffs, “Over the past few years, the company has invested too much, too fast — without enough demand.”

In January, Tan began to change his tune, saying Intel was “going long” on its next-generation technology, the 14A. Tan said on an earnings call last week that “many customers” are “actively testing the technology” and that it is being developed at speeds above 18A.

Intel’s only major external commitment to the foundation so far came from Elon Musk. Intel announced earlier this month that it will join Musk’s Terafab chip complex in Austin, Texas, to help “design, manufacture, and package 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 aims to make chips that will be used in Tesla cars and robots, as well as datacenters yet to be built at SpaceX.

Moorhead said Musk’s announcement, while vague, is what caused Intel’s stock to “absolutely explode.”

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

Advanced packaging

Another big play for Intel is advanced packaging, a little-known step in the chipmaking process that involves the die-cutting of individual chips to be connected to larger systems with complex paths. Intel’s EMIB packaging – an embedded multi-die interconnect bridge – rivals TSMC’s leading CoWoS packaging technology.

Nvidia has retained most of the CoWoS capacity at TSMC, which means advanced packaging is set to be the next bottleneck in AI chipmaking. As one of only three companies that can make advanced packaging, Intel is in a good position to take advantage of this restricted supply.

When Intel stock jumped after first-quarter earnings, the packaging was important. CFO David Zinsner told CNBC that improved packaging will bring in billions of dollars each year, after previously estimating that number would be in the hundreds of millions. Intel advanced packaging clients include Amazon, Ciscoand new commitments from SpaceX and Tesla.

Google said in April it would continue to use Intel chips in its AI data centers, but the Internet giant may use Intel for advanced packaging. Google makes its own custom AI accelerators called tensor processing units (TPUs), and reports suggest that its upcoming 8th generation chip could be integrated into Intel’s EMIB technology.

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

Intel declined to comment on the matter.

Moorhead also pointed to Nvidia as another packaging customer that will eventually come to Intel. “But I think TSMC will do whatever they can to stop that,” he said.

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