Intel stock surges to fresh all-time highs after 26 years
For the first time since the dot-com bubble, Intel is back at the top.
The chipmaker's stock just hit a fresh all-time high of $133. That milestone capped a run that few on Wall Street would have predicted even a year ago, allowing Intel's stock to finally push above its August 2000 peak.
Intel (INTC) stock is up more than 225% so far in 2026. Over the past 12 months, INTC stock has been up 445%.
The gains are rooted in something far more tangible: real earnings growth, a foundry business finding its footing, and an artificial intelligence buildout that is suddenly pointing straight at Intel's core products.
Intel's comeback was built in the fab
To understand how Intel got here, you have to go back to the factory floor.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan took the helm over a year ago, inheriting a company that had fallen behind in manufacturing and lost investor confidence. His first order of business was simple but brutal: fix the fabs.
It worked.
- Intel's Q1 results showed revenue of $13.6 billion, $1.4 billion above the midpoint of the company's own guidance.
- Earnings per share came in at $0.29 against a guidance of breakeven. It was the sixth straight quarter Intel beat its own financial targets.
- Yields on Intel's most advanced chip-making process, called 18A, are now running ahead of internal projections.
- Better yields mean more usable chips per wafer, lower costs, and higher margins.
- CFO David Zinsner said that 18A yields are on pace to hit year-end targets by the middle of 2026, months ahead of schedule.
In April, Intel also bought back the 49% stake in its Fab 34 facility in Ireland that Apollo-managed funds had held.
The deal, worth $14.2 billion, gives Intel full ownership of one of Europe's most advanced semiconductor fabs.
Intel funded the transaction with roughly $7.7 billion in cash and $6.5 billion in new debt, and management called it highly accretive to earnings per share.
AI continues to accelerate CPU demand
For the past few years, the AI chip conversation has been almost entirely about graphics processing units (GPUs).
Related: Bank of America revamps Intel stock price target
Intel, a central processing unit (CPU) company at its core, was largely left out.
As AI moves from training large models for real-world deployment, think chatbots, agentic systems, and physical AI like robots, the CPU is re-emerging as an essential part of the equation.
CPUs handle orchestration: managing workloads, routing data, and coordinating across systems.
Tan put it plainly on the earnings call:
"The CPU now serves as the orchestration layer and critical control plane for the entire AI stack. This is not just our wishful thinking - it is what we hear from our customers."
Intel's data center and AI segment (DCAI) posted $5.1 billion in Q1 revenue, up 7% sequentially and 22% year-over-year.
Intel's Xeon 6 processor was selected as the host CPU for Nvidia's DGX Rubin NVL8 systems.
In April, Intel and Google announced a multiyear collaboration to power Google Cloud infrastructure across AI, inference, and general-purpose workloads, including co-development of custom infrastructure processing units (IPUs).
Google will deploy Intel Xeon processors across multiple generations of cloud instances, with both companies committed to improving performance and energy efficiency at scale.
Intel also signed multiple other long-term agreements with customers in Q1. Zinsner said most run three to five years and include both volume and pricing commitments, giving Intel unprecedented demand visibility.
The Apple Deal is a foundry game-changer
The most explosive single-day move came last week, when Intel shares surged nearly 14% after the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple (AAPL) and Intel had reached a preliminary chip-making agreement.
The report indicated Intel would manufacture some chips for Apple's devices. No specific products were named, and neither company commented publicly.
Related: Apple reaches chipmaking deal with Intel, pushing its stock to new record
Apple currently relies entirely on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing for its most advanced chips.
TSMC's capacity is under enormous pressure from AI chip demand. Intel, now ramping its 18A node in Chandler, Ariz., has positioned itself as the only credible American alternative at the leading edge of chip manufacturing.
The Apple report landed after Intel's stock had already cleared its dot-com era peak from 2000, turning a long recovery story into a record-high rally.
Intel finished April with a gain of roughly 100%, the best monthly performance in company history, and was already up 25% in May at the time of the report.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, announced plans to use Intel's next-generation 14A node at Terafab, his planned $119 billion chip fabrication complex in Austin, Texas, which aims to manufacture chips for Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI.
The short squeeze in play
Traders who bet against Intel have been badly burned. Since hitting a 2026 low on March 30, Intel stock is up over 200%, adding more than $440 billion to the company's market capitalization and pushing short-sellers' paper losses above $12 billion, according to data from S3 Partners.
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Despite those losses, short interest as a percentage of Intel's float remains near a 52-week high - meaning bears are still pressing their bets.
According to Bloomberg Matthew Unterman, managing director at S3 Partners, stated, "Intel's almost like a poster child for the momentum trade right now. At some point, the momentum's going to stall."
But with every dip, buyers have returned, backed by a story that now has fundamental legs.
- The U.S. government took an equity stake in Intel last summer.
- NVIDIA followed with a $5 billion investment in September.
- And management's Q2 guidance, a revenue range of $13.8 billion to $14.8 billion, came in well above Wall Street expectations, with DCAI projected to grow by double digits sequentially.
Intel is, in many ways, still in the early stages of its comeback. The foundry business is losing money, gross margins remain well below where management wants them to be, and competition from AMD- and Arm-based chips is fierce.
But for a company that was in survival mode just over a year ago, a 26-year stock record feels like more than a milestone. It feels like a strategic reset.
Related: AMD and Intel lead 2026 gains as AI guard changes
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This story was originally published May 13, 2026 at 11:47 AM.