The Intel logo is displayed in front of Intel headquarters in Santa Clara, California on January 22, 2026.
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Intel stocks soared 24% on Friday, their best performance since October 1987, as investors encouraging signs of a resumption of growth due to the increase in power artificial intelligence request.
The stock closed at $82.57 and is now up 124% this year after surging 84% in 2025. Friday’s rally topped a 23% gain for the stock on Sept. 18, when Nvidia agreed to invest $5 billion in the company.
CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who took the reins early last year, has reignited Wall Street’s interest in the struggling chipmaker by curbing investments from the Trump administration and Nvidiaand helping the company navigate its way into the AI boom, where it had previously been largely excluded.
“INTC’s new CEO has fixed the balance sheet and is implementing a strategy that appears to have put INTC back on the competitive path,” Evercore ISI analysts wrote in a post-earnings report, upgrading the shares to the equivalent of a buy rating.
First-quarter revenue beat estimates and rose 7.2% to $13.58 billion from $12.67 billion a year earlier. In five of the previous seven quarters, the company reported year-over-year revenue declines. Intel also issued optimistic guidance for the second quarter.
The Wall Street rally marks a sharp turnaround for the American chipmaker, which lost 60% of its value in 2024, leading to the expulsion of Pat Gelsinger as CEO in December of the same year.
For years, the company largely stayed out of the AI race as it struggled with manufacturing delays and waited for a major customer for its chipmaking business.
Some analysts are waiting to see promising yields from Intel’s next-generation 14A manufacturing technology, predicted for 2028 or beyond. Having previously indicated that Intel would wait for a major customer to emerge before incurring the expense of transitioning to the latest technology, Tan said the in January, Intel “goes all in on 14A.”
Tan said on Thursday’s earnings conference call that “multiple customers” are “actively evaluating the technology” and that its development is occurring at a faster pace than Intel has seen with its 18A technology.
Intel’s data center business is driving much of the current growth. Revenue jumped 22% from the previous year to $5.1 billion as AI fuels renewed demand for central processing units. CEO Tan called processors “the indispensable foundation of the AI era” during the earnings call.
Citi analysts upgraded the stock to buy from a neutral rating, anticipating increased processor sales for all vendors over the next few years.
Correction: An earlier version of this story had the wrong year for the last time Intel had such a big stock move.
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