The Intel logo is displayed in front of Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on January 22, 2026.
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intel Shares soared 24% on Friday, their best performance since October 1987, as investors cheered signs of new growth from rising demand for artificial intelligence.
The stock closed at $82.57 and is up 124% this year after rising 84% in 2025. Friday’s rise exceeded the 23% rise in stock prices on Sept. 18, when Nvidia agreed to invest $5 billion in the company.
Chief Executive Officer Lip Vu Tan, who took the helm early last year, has wooed investment from the Trump administration and revived Wall Street interest in the struggling chipmaker. NvidiaAnd by helping the company tap into the AI boom from which it had been largely shut out,
“INTC’s new CEO has reformed the balance sheet and is implementing a strategy that appears to have put INTC back on track to compete,” Evercore ISI analysts said in a post-earnings report, raising their rating on the stock to the equivalent of buy.
First-quarter sales exceeded expectations, increasing 7.2% to $13.58 billion from $12.67 billion in the same period last year. In five of the past seven quarters, the company posted year-over-year revenue declines. Intel also announced an upbeat second-quarter outlook.
The gains on Wall Street mark a major turnaround for the U.S. chipmaker, which lost 60% of its value in 2024 and led to the firing of CEO Pat Gelsinger in December of the same year.
The company largely stayed out of the AI race for years as it dealt with manufacturing delays and waited for big customers for its chip-making business.
Some analysts are counting on promising yields for Intel’s next-generation 14A manufacturing technology, planned for 2028 and beyond. Tan said at X in January that Intel was “very committed to 14A,” after previously suggesting that Intel would wait for large customers to emerge before rolling out the latest technology.
Tan said on Thursday’s earnings call that “multiple customers” are “actively evaluating this technology” and development is progressing at a faster pace than Intel has seen with its 18A technology.
Intel’s data center business is a major driver of its current growth. Revenue grew 22% year-over-year to $5.1 billion as AI renewed demand for central processing units. CEO Tan called the CPU “an indispensable foundation in the AI era” at the company’s financial results conference.
Citi analysts expected CPU sales to increase across all suppliers over the next few years and upgraded the stock from a neutral rating to a buy.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly listed the last year Intel had such a large stock price change.
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