Catenaa, Friday, May 08, 2026- Intel stock has surged over 109% in the last 30 days, following another 12% rise on Friday, driven by AI CPU demand and preliminary talks about an Apple foundry deal.
Intel stock trades at 119x forward P/E with an analyst average price target of $80.93, implying 36% potential downside despite a Q1 earnings beat and CHIPS Act support backstopping the turnaround.
Through Friday’s surge, Intel had already advanced 234% year to date, and a remarkable 488% over the trailing year. The stock has essentially tripled in 2026 alone, recovering from the deeply depressed levels that defined Intel’s late-2025 stretch.
Two narratives are powering Intel’s surge. CNBC’s Jim Cramer recently highlighted a spike in CPU demand driven by AI, framing Intel as a key player in data center compute as inference and agentic workloads scale across the industry.
The second catalyst is the bigger one. Reports of a preliminary chip manufacturing agreement with Apple have fueled intense speculation, and this marks the third major Intel rally tied to foundry news in recent months.
The bulls see the talks as validation of Intel Foundry Services, the long-running effort to turn Intel into a credible contract chipmaker.
Fundamentals back part of the story, too. Intel’s Q1 2026 report delivered non-GAAP EPS of $0.29 versus a $0.0127 consensus and revenue of $13.58 billion against a $12.43 billion estimate, with the Data Center and AI segment reinforcing the AI-CPU thesis.
Triple-digit gains in roughly a month are historically anomalous and often precede sharp corrections. Intel’s 14-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) hit 80.5 on May 7, deep into overbought territory, after peaking at 87.48 on May 1. Sustained RSI readings above 80 historically precede pullbacks or consolidation.
Wall Street remains skeptical of Intel at these levels. The average analyst price target sits at $80.93, implying roughly 36% downside from current prices, with the rating mix skewed toward 30 Holds against just 13 Buys.
Retail investors are debating the same question. A Reddit post flagging Intel’s forward P/E ratio of 119x attracted 672 upvotes and 259 comments, while the Apple foundry agreement remains reportedly preliminary rather than a signed contract.
If the Apple foundry deal materializes, the revenue and credibility impact would be transformational for Intel.
Strategic wins are already stacking up, including a multiyear partnership with Alphabet’s Google for Xeon processors and custom ASIC IPU co-development and the selection of Intel Xeon 6 as host CPU for NVIDIA’s DGX Rubin NVL8 systems.
Government support adds a structural backstop for Intel. The company received a $5.7 billion CHIPS Act disbursement alongside $5 billion equity investments from NVIDIA and $2 billion from SoftBank in prior quarters, validating the long-term turnaround thesis.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan framed the AI tailwind directly. “The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user, moving from foundational models to inference to agentic. This shift is significantly increasing the need for Intel’s CPUs and wafer and advanced packaging offerings,” Tan asserted on the most recent call.
