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A company that spent years fighting for relevance is suddenly the hottest stock in the market.
It has been quite a ride. Intel Corp. has become one of the hottest stocks in the S&P 500 Index, thanks to a nine-day surge that added more than $100 billion in market value.
The rally marks Intel’s best winning run over any nine-day period since at least the 1970s. It is a remarkable win for a company that has been publicly traded since 1971.
What triggered it? A cascade of major announcements that arrived in rapid succession, each one seemingly bigger than the last.
The Deals That Started the Hike
An early April announcement that Intel had agreed to pay $14.2 billion to buy back half of a plant in Ireland from Apollo Global Management. Just a year earlier, Intel had sold that same 49% stake as part of its cost-cutting efforts. Buying it back signaled renewed financial confidence.
Then came the partnerships. Intel announced it would join Elon Musk’s Terafab project — an advanced AI chip complex planned for Austin, Texas, designed to develop semiconductors for Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Musk’s Terafab project is one of his most ambitious infrastructure ventures, with a planned semiconductor facility estimated at $20–$25 billion and capable of generating around 1 terawatt of computing capacity annually.
Google followed shortly after. Intel announced an expansion of its partnership with Google, which will use Intel’s newest Xeon 6 central processing units to run AI training and inference workloads.
This combination sent investors into a frenzy. Retail chatter around Intel stock surged over 137% in 24 hours, reflecting extremely bullish sentiment, according to Stocktwits data.
There’s also a broader tailwind at play. CPUs are seeing a resurgence as agentic artificial intelligence continues to gain traction. UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri noted that demand for server central processing units is moving “materially higher,” and that Intel has been able to raise prices for its server CPUs by approximately 10%.
Is It Too Expensive?
For all the excitement, some analysts are pumping the brakes.
The stock is now trading at more than 90 times estimated earnings for the next 12 months — its highest valuation on record, going back to the early 1980s. That’s over 50% above where it traded at the peak of the dot-com bubble.
As of early April 2026, the median analyst price target for Intel is $46.97, based on 30 analyst estimates — well below where the stock has been trading. The consensus rating remains a Hold, with only about 20% of analysts recommending a Buy or Strong Buy.
UBS’s Arcuri put it plainly: with the stock already up roughly 40% in a single month, “whether this will be enough to drive the stock higher is a bigger question.” He noted that Intel currently trades at around 20 times the bull-case consensus for 2030, suggesting that upside “from current levels is somewhat limited.”
Of the 52 analysts tracked by Bloomberg who follow the shares, just 10 have buy ratings, while six have sell ratings — more than double the average sell-rating proportion for an S&P 500 stock.
Bulls See a Longer Game
Not everyone is ready to call the top, though. Some analysts argue the market may be undervaluing Intel’s long-term earnings trajectory.
Seaport Group’s Jay Goldberg, one of many analysts to upgrade the stock in 2026, said Wall Street is “probably underestimating” Intel’s long-term earnings prospects. He pointed out that while Nvidia faces increasingly high expectations, Intel, coming off a difficult multi-year stretch, has more room to surprise on the upside.
Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote that “the Intel narrative keeps accelerating,” adding that “the thesis around Intel’s value as a strategic foundry asset seems to be validated daily.”
While Intel is expected to post a net loss this year, its net income is projected to reach $0.33 per share in 2027 and $2.13 per share by 2029, according to Bloomberg data. That’s the longer-term story bulls are betting on.
Northland analyst Gus Richard went further, raising his price target to $92 and arguing that Intel’s deals with the U.S. government, Nvidia, Tesla, and Google highlight its “strategic importance as one of only three remaining leading logic chipmakers” — at a time when leading-edge chip capacity is scarce and Taiwan’s geopolitical situation creates uncertainty around TSMC.
What’s Next: The Earnings Test
The immediate catalyst on the horizon is Intel’s earnings report, scheduled for April 23. Expectations are high, but so is the bar.
Intel beat Q4 2025 earnings estimates by a wide margin, delivering EPS of $0.15 against expectations of $0.04. Analysts now estimate a loss of $0.04 per share for Q1 2026. A strong beat or more partnership news could keep momentum alive. A miss could quickly unwind some of the gains.
Thomas Hayes, chairman of Great Hill Capital, summarized the shift in sentiment bluntly: “It is clearly no longer on life support.” That’s a meaningful statement about a company that, not long ago, was staring down existential questions about its future in chip manufacturing.
Whether Intel can hold these gains depends on whether the story of a strategic foundry renaissance can eventually be backed by earnings that justify one of the richest valuations in the semiconductor sector. For now, the market has decided it’s willing to wait and see.
