Considering they were $17/sh in Nov 2024 and $36/sh in Nov 2025, today's price of $67.50 seems like a huge return in just two years.

Yup we live inside an ever growing noise factory thanks to modern news/social media attention harvesting dynamics. All sides are using it on autopilot.

The systems are optimized for pumping more and more bits out. Not to measure/reduce noise and increase signal.

Individually its easier to tune it out.

Intel was at 15 bucks for multiple years post its peaks.

I'm not sure it's quite like a meme stock, it's dropping because their earnings were below what was expected.

It is still at a forward P/E of 31, on par with AMD's 32 and far above Nvidia's 13.

Im still bullish on them at this price though. The terafab (already under construction) collab with Elon and 14A being the most powerful chip when they get it right has a lot of potential.

Pet peeve: when the news reports in absolute points. "S&P down 125 points!" OK, now I have to do (trivial, but some) math to size it up. Oh, that's 1.3% drop? OK, now I get the magnitude.

Tomorrow, they'll report the Dow is up 1572.

Intel isn't important though.

I think they should be unlisted and come back if they can profit $1 for two quarters in a row.

FYI there is a reason for that.

Stocks are valued as the sum total of all the profits they ever make (net present value of future earnings).

So even at $1 profit/year - technically worth infinity.

But due to 'time value of money and risk' (aka some risk free discount rate you can put your money elsewhere at get the same return for zero risk, like your bank account), then the infinite sum of those $1/year becomes some finite sum.

The problem wit this math is when profits grow perpetually higher than the cost of borrowing - the net present value goes to infinity.

A P/E ratio = 1/(cost of capital - growth rate). Assuming no dividends.

An investor with 8% cost of capital, a company growing at 3% per year woudl have a P/E of 20.

At 7% growth the value is p/e 100x ...

Any growth over the 'cost of capital' and the P/E goes to infinity because the infinite sum of all future cash flows does not converge.

What this means is that the valuation math breaks down when there are gigantic swings of in growth at rates of even like 30% more for any extended period; it's extremely hard to value.

Verizon is valued as it is because they have an operational lock on a system; they will never grow that much but their returns are predictable. You can spreadsheet their valuation.

All this AI stuff is 'inherently wild' because growth is high, but opaque. Yes, there is a lot of hyperbole and speculation but this is very different than Space X which is a 'Musk Meme' stock, upheld be retail investors.

Edit: this is the most rudimentary articulation of how stocks are valued. It's not made up hunches, and companies that invest a lot in these things have a lot of numeric justification they have to use to make the assessment - and NPV is at the core of it. That 'math' is the first order concept that underlies valuation and it's the hyperbolic nature of growth beyond cost of capital that makes the it come undone which is the mechanical basis for the wild swings. It's what happens to valuation when you make small adjustments in only a few parts of the model.

There will be a company using Intel's fabs to make chips 5, 10 or 20 years from now. Because it is in the national interest of US to make sure that happens.

It is not in the national interest to make sure that the Intel common stock remains valued above 0. Plenty of companies that are of national interest were saved directly from bankruptcy, by nationalizing them in a way that wipes out the common stock.

The lack of self awareness of HN posters thinking that these 'dumb finance people' can't understand how 'chips are made'.

Good gosh. Goldman probably has 50-100 people, inc. maybe 20 Engineers just on that alone, full time.

And yes, Intel can fail 100%. They can absolutely go into receivership and/or be broken up and bought for pennies by other entities.

It would be a strategic dismantling, obviously the government won't allow certain things to happen, but they could 100% allow investors to be wiped out.

Boeing is a bit different as there are no substitutes, but it could go into receivership. Some parts of Boeing will 'always exist' but the corporate entity can fail.

> Intel, like Boeing cannot fail.

Failure here is getting restructured and people losing money in the stock market, which I guess is so detached from the actual companies and reality that it might as well be a polymarket bet (I mean overall stock market and not intel specifically).

The stock can and did fell to under 20. Yes, US government will not allow it to fail, but that does not mean shareholders will profit from it.

A lot of retail investors lose the shirts off their backs holding Intel stock well before Intel every approaches anything close to "failure". Intel stock could drop 90% and the machines will still be running, because stock valuations which aren't tied to fundamentals on the way up are also not tied to fundamentals on the way down.

"Failure" here can be something like the stock going to near 0 and then the govt hands Intel fabs to some other rich company that it likes, for example SpaceX at a criminally low rate

In the worst case when the free market deems Intel worthless, the government will nationalize Intel at a cheap nominal price. Shareholders are wiped out anyways.

The question is, would it outgrow the inflation rate.

Intel should just spin off its fabs. You can't expect competitors to use your fabs.

Of course Intel can fail. If revenue is down, they have to reduce investment in future nodes, making them even more uncompetitive in the future, reducing revenue even more, etc.

>you better start searching for a bunker.

Been looking for one the last 20 years.

>The finance bozos are clueless, again.

You're much too generous. They are so far beyond merely clueless... these are the bumblefucks that will tip off the end of the world.

they had stellar switching fabric. they fired most of them.

Where are you seeing 1.5%? I see 8% in the last 24 hours, 35% in the last week, and 49% in the last month. You don't think this qualifies as a "rout"?

> Intel just doesn't pay their engineers enough, so most don't car

As someone who considered a job at Intel about 10 years ago (including having to submit to a somewhat humiliating panel-style interview) what made me instantly decide that I didn't want a job there was seeing how their office in my area (PNW) was a 1990s cube-farm.

I appreciate that Intel's workplace was (and still is?) egalitarian because _everyone_ has a cube, but today it's just so soul-destroying to lay eyes on.

So I agree they have a very unappealing culture, but it isn't as simple as paying people more (unless it's to pay for an interior designer and carpenters to overhaul their office...).

Apple Silicon launched in Mac, the first couple iterations worked/sold great. By the launch of M3 market realized it wasn't a fluke and that x86 was dead but still fundamental due to deployment at the time

Flash forward a couple more years to now it's all about efficient model training which sucks on generic CPUs so everyone is buying and designing other chips

Two big consumer pivots over 4-5 years and boom ...they're IBM and handed lifelines to shore up chip manufacturing in the US for strategic reasons but Intel essentially manufactures rotary phones right now. Maybe the fab biz will get modern designs right. We'll see

Pre-AI-boom, Intel was a failing chipmaker. The situation was bad in all respects. Processor design fell behind AMD. Fabs fell behind TSMC/Samsung/etc. Culture was broken. Massive braindrain.

Stock was down three-fold between its peak around 2019 and its bottom in 2024/2025. Indeed, it was down three-fold in 2024/2025 from its 2000 dot-com peak.

Basically, imploding company, on its way for collapse.

With AI boom, there was more demand for ICs than production capacity. It almost didn't matter how bad your chips were -- someone would buy them, and at a healthy markup. This placed Intel in a very strong position to recover.

That recovered some value -- going above their previous high, but much less than 25 years of S&P500 growth. However, it's worth remembering the peak of $120 was less than double it's dot-com peak 25 years prior.

If AI boom doesn't materialize, Intel may, again, be on a path to death.

If it does materialize, but like the dot-com boom with a few winners and many losers, Intel will likely be one of the losers.

Ergo, falling value.

NVidia, in contrast, looks a lot more like the Amazon of the dot-com bust.

From what I read, Intel's recent chip production strategy was a miss, in that they focused on chips for laptops and not for the chips for AI data centers.

More specifically, they focused on making laptop chips like Panther Lake (Intel's latest and greatest) and they meant to make a lot of their money here, and the data center chips weren't focused on as much (I think these would be something like the Xeon 6, but not sure, but I read that they also could have boosted production of older data center chips). But, as it turns out, laptop sales are down because of the demand for DRAM is sky high from the AI data center build out, and not as many people are willing to buy a super expensive laptop. If they had forecasted more correctly, they would have focused more on making data center chips.

Also, their forward guidance for 2027 is lower than expected too, because it will take awhile to shift their production towards building more data center chips, which they are in the middle of doing.

But, you may want to check other sources because have only been somewhat loosely following what's happening with Intel.

A better comparison is probably AMD, since they also make server CPUs.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD/

I figured the current owners of INTC stock are betting on the success of their fab business.. I think that's still to play out.

Intel GPUs are pretty worthless right now for inference, let alone training. Which isn't to say that there aren't people getting value out of them, but from a dollars/wattage/sanity to performance, there's no point to buying anything but Nvidia for most people and businesses. I don't want this to be the case, but that's just how it is currently.

Because people are buying Nvidia products way more than Intel products, one would think. Nvidia owns the whole AI movement. Intel doesn't.

I understand nothing but I want to join the conversation.

It seems to me that nvidia bubble is still to burst. There is a trust me bro circle where Nvidia somehow sold GPU to itself so it can host someone else's models. Maybe three years ago or a little more they announced they plan to move away from consumer end and focus on cloud. Back then it did not make much sense because everybody though "how the f Nvidia will manage clouds like AWS?" And their business model seems to me that it is a shared risk model where Nvidia don't "own" the cloud but pay for its GPU to have that market share. I think it would make much sense if the thin layer those, how did the greedy musk said, neocloud/cloudfronts or whatever, were not so brittle due to the lack of market demand.

I have the impression they had a gold strategy for them but for some reason they rushed it too much and now they broke the market before they could profit from it.

I can imagine that if they didn't hoard their own resources to create scarcity artificiality, they would possibly have a stronger position in the market. I can only think they did this because (A) they know the current government will bail them out and (B) someone was worried that China could hoard those GPUs first.

But as I said, I don't understand much of the topic, but it seems to me they are try to get as much money as soon as possible and that looks scam-ish to me. They all put investment rounds too close to each other, started creating concerning stories and "rogue" AIs at the same time. Maybe I'm being too paranoid, but so far those guys have been pulling some hat tricks and I think I know who will pay the bill

Edit: Also I think the big ones artificially produced better numbers by doing massive layoff rounds. Depending on how those happen, it produces almost an immediate loss that can be smoothed, and then a peak on profit, and then we will see if their numbers keep up 2 or 3 quarter after that. Maybe I have trust issues, but man, this does smell weird.

the markets that Intel focuses on have larger/easier freedom of choice for the consumers, for one.

things are changing but there is a sort of "no one ever got fired for using nvidia for inference." thing going on.

NVidia had $96B in revenue and $60B of profit in Q2 2026, both of which doubled or more from Q2 2025.

Intel in Q3 2026 had $16.5B in revenue and $3.3B of profit, and $13.7B and $4.4B in Q3 2025.

NVidia is doing much better than Intel, people are selling bonds and junk bonds to buy billions of dollars of NVidia cards that NVidia is making 75% gross margins on. They’re making the kind of profits that would make a drug dealer blush.

I used Q3 earnings for Intel because Nvidia hasn’t reported their Q3 earnings yet and Intel’s Q2 earnings showed losses in both 2026 and 2025.

That's just one small event along the way, one that occurred many years after Intel started slipping enough for long enough that an iPhone was more powerful than an Intel laptop and after Intel's fabs failed to produce a useful new generation many generations in a row and after Intel acquired many companies just to spin down their products and after...

This started at Skylake.

Definitely, because his shtick falls apart without his legendary consistency and accountability.

bruh. cmon.

Not really. As far as I can tell the reason Intel routed seems to be because of an explosion in one of their fabs making Xeons which reduced production, and because no one buys new desktops and servers anymore because of the cost of RAM and storage. Given intel isn't big on AI chips, they are a casualty of the AI bubble.

Local model utopia!