Intel surged 10%: 6x carnival hit the $82 target

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Intel surged 10%: 6x carnival hit the $82 target

Thursday, June 18, 2026

A post posted on the president's social media account, with even the company involved refusing to comment, could inflate the market value of a veteran chip giant by tens of billions of dollars in a single day—this is today's Intel.

Trump stated on Truth Social that Apple will work with Intel to design and manufacture chips domestically in the U.S., $INTC jumped 10.64% to close at $133.99, with a market value of about $673.4 billion.

Ironically, Apple has not responded, and Intel itself simply replied, "No comment on potential agreements." How can a cooperation with no signed confirmation from any party sustain a celebration of over 60 billion USD in a single day?

A family of veterans holding both blueprints and assembly lines

Founded in 1968, Intel is one of the few vertically integrated companies worldwide capable of both designing chips and building its own wafer fabs for mass production. Its revenue is composed of three segments: Client-Side Computing (CCG), Data Center and Artificial Intelligence (DCAI), and foundry services like Intel Foundry.

CCG sells the CPUs in your laptops, with customers including Dell, HP, and Lenovo; DCAI provides server chips and network products, head-on with the AI infrastructure wave; Foundry, on the other hand, is trying to lease its factories to external customers, aiming to benchmark against TSMC.

If TSMC is a "foundry" that only builds but doesn't design, and Nvidia is a "blueprint vendor" that only designs but doesn't manufacture, then Intel is one of the few "all-rounders" who want to do both.

The question is: is the all-around a moat, or a burden of being attacked on three fronts at once?

Loss-making financial reports and an incalculable price-to-earnings ratio

On a GAAP basis, Intel is still losing money, with negative earnings per share, and the price-to-earnings ratio is simply incalculable. The market can only settle for price-to-sales ratio, which has been pushed two to three times the historical average of 3-4 times.

In other words, current valuations are almost not supported by current earnings, but rather on betting on a transformation story that has yet to be realized. The research report gives a probability-weighted fair value of about $86, meaning the current price is more than half above its intrinsic value.

Even more glaring is Wall Street's attitude

Dozens of analysts covering Intel have an average target price between $79 and $85, with a consensus rating of "neutral."

When a stock's current price is nearly 40% higher than the average target of professional institutions, are you buying the company, or is it a more optimistic expectation than everyone else?

A 50-year-old company is pricing a story that hasn't been delivered

Intel has long passed the age of being a "growth stock," with mature and stable CCG and DCAI businesses. But right now, what the market is pricing isn't these old businesses, but whether the foundry transformation, mass production of 18A advanced processes, and the AI ecosystem can be implemented.

This is precisely why the report categorizes it as the "eve of a breakthrough" rather than the "maturity period": catalysts are everywhere, but financial results have been slow to arrive.

Technically, the stock price is well above the 50-day moving average (about $100) and the 200-day moving average (about $55), showing a significant divergence. Market sentiment is clearly still on the bulls' side, but the higher it stands, the greater the gap during pullbacks.

Three fronts, three opponents stronger than himself

Intel's embarrassment lies in facing a more focused and stronger opponent on every battlefield. The foundry sector is TSMC—mature processes, stable yield, long-term customers of Apple and Nvidia, with profitability far surpassing Intel.

AMD dominates the client and server CPU battlegrounds, which have steadily eroded Intel's market share over the past few years thanks to Zen architecture and chiplet design. The AI accelerator battlefield is NVIDIA, with a moat in the CUDA ecosystem so deep that Intel's Gaudi series can barely get involved.

So what unique weapons does Intel still have? The answer lies in geopolitics.

As the largest domestic wafer manufacturer in the United States, it is the core bearer of the CHIPS Act. The U.S. government has converted CHIPS grants into equity, buying about 433 million shares at $20.47 per share, holding nearly 10%. This layer of "national team" endorsement is a moat that TSMC and Samsung cannot provide—it's also a double-edged sword.

A $400 billion ceiling and three completely different futures

Intel spans multiple submarkets including CPUs, AI chips, semiconductor foundry, and advanced packaging, with a total market size exceeding $400 billion. But how much they can truly absorb depends on the success or failure of the transformation.

The report presents three scenarios

Under optimistic conditions, the 18A will be mass-produced and secured by major clients like Apple and Nvidia, with revenue in fiscal year 2028 possibly reaching $65-70 billion; Neutral scenario revenue grew moderately to 55-60 billion; If the pessimistic scenario shows the yield rate of 18A falling short of expectations, revenue could further slide to 45-50 billion.

With a current market cap of about $673.4 billion, the implied expectations are almost at the most optimistic level. Between reality and pricing, how much room is left for disappointment?

Profit signals masked by one-time expenses

Putting aside the political noise of that day, Intel's bullish logic is actually more solid than the original research report—especially since the latest quarterly financial report hides several easily overlooked positive signals.

An unsigned announcement cannot support a sixfold increase

But the bears' reasoning is equally sharp: the current price has already priced in all the good news but left no buffer for bad news.

Bad news that is hard to tell from false, and a verifiable financial report

In the coming months, Intel's stock price will be dominated by a few "mixed truths" events, with whoever lands first will gain the final say.

From $20 to $134, a yearly surge in expectations

Intel has taken the most dramatic curve in modern history this year. The starting point is the darkest hour of fiscal year 2024—a net loss of $18.756 billion for the full year, with a single-quarter loss of $16.6 billion in the third quarter, almost a 'suspended sentence' for the market.

The turning point came in August 2025: the U.S. government converted CHIPS grants into equity, buying nearly 10% of shares at $20.47 per share. The entry of the "national team" sparked a valuation revaluation, combined with AI narratives and foundry stories, driving the stock price to $133.99 today—nearly 250% year-to-date, and about six times higher in terms of share price.

But the financial report has lagged far behind the stock price. GAAP will lose another $3.7 billion in Q1 2026, yet the market "selectively ignores" it. This divergence between stock prices and fundamentals widens further, meaning that any disappointing expectation will amplify the damage.

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