What Happened?
Shares of computer processor maker Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) jumped 10.4% in the afternoon session after President Trump posted on Truth Social that "Apple agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America."
Intel has spent years and tens of billions of dollars trying to transform itself from a product-only chipmaker into a contract manufacturer capable of competing with TSMC. That bet has been the central question mark over the company's turnaround.
Landing Apple, the single most coveted external customer in the semiconductor world, would be the clearest possible validation of that thesis. Reports of preliminary discussions had been circulating since May. Trump's post, framed as a national manufacturing win, confirms the relationship has at minimum reached the point where the president is publicly endorsing it.
Neither Apple nor Intel has confirmed the deal in any formal statement. And manufacturing yield is still the real test: Intel's fabs must demonstrate they can reliably produce the advanced nodes Apple's chips require at commercial scale. The government backstop is real, the US holds roughly a 10% equity stake in Intel after converting $9 billion in CHIPS Act funding, but equity stakes do not guarantee silicon.
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What Is The Market Telling Us
Intel’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 52 moves greater than 5% over the last year. But moves this big are rare even for Intel and indicate this news significantly impacted the market’s perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 6 days ago when the stock gained 5.9% as the market continued to digest the Bank of America double upgrade while the chip sector accelerated on continued Iran peace deal momentum.
Analyst Vivek Arya raised BofA's 2030 server CPU TAM to more than $170 billion from $125 billion, and now models Intel's earnings power at more than $6 per share by 2030, up from a prior $3–$4 range. The thesis is that agentic AI expands the CPU's role from supporting GPU clusters to orchestrating reasoning loops, memory state, and tool use.
On Intel's Q1 FY2026 call, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the CPU-to-GPU mix has tightened from about 1:8 in training-heavy deployments to roughly 1:4, and could move toward parity or even tilt further toward CPUs as inference and agentic workloads scale.
On foundry, BofA values the external manufacturing opportunity at more than $45 billion by 2030. Tan said 18A yields are running ahead of internal projections, and that 14A maturity, yield, and performance are outpacing 18A at a similar stage.
CFO David Zinsner said demand continues to outpace supply across the business. Macro helped the session: after Trump called off planned strikes and pointed to a possible deal, oil fell sharply by roughly 3–4% and the 10-year Treasury yield eased from about 4.55% to the mid-4.40s, easing one of the pressure points on rate-sensitive chip multiples.
Intel is up 240% since the beginning of the year, and at $133.72 per share, it has set a new 52-week high. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Intel’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $2,402.
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