Intel shares climbed roughly 25% over five trading sessions as CPU demand tied to AI agents surged. CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company is filling only about half of customer orders, and Intel raised its capital spending forecast to meet the demand.
Intel shares climbed roughly 25% from $97.14 on September 15 to $121.78 on September 21. The final session alone delivered a 12.14% pop. The rally rippled across the sector, lifting Arm Holdings more than 13% and AMD roughly 9-10% on the same day.
CEO ties the surge to AI agents
Speaking at the AI Infra Summit last week, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said CPUs are in high demand due to reinforcement learning, agentic AI, and system-level orchestration. CPUs, once seen as also-rans next to GPUs, now enable agents to navigate websites, shop online, and perform other tasks while GPUs run the underlying models.
Meta's new Muse AI agent has become a hit, with market intelligence firm Sensor Tower reporting 2.5 million downloads since it launched September 8. The app also topped the US iOS App Store's free-app charts for three consecutive days, according to Crypto Briefing.
Intel can't keep up with orders
At Splunk's .conf26 conference, Tan said Intel is currently fulfilling only about 50% of customer CPU orders. The company raised its full-year capital expenditure forecast to $20 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $18 billion — an 11% increase in planned spending. That comes as Q2 sales rose 25% year-over-year. Intel is also reportedly expected to raise the price of its CPUs 10%, according to a report by Digitimes.
A broader turnaround
The rally lands amid a wider Intel turnaround. The company is building a third-party chip manufacturing business to compete with TSMC. In June, The Information reported that Google chose Intel to manufacture its custom Tensor Processing Units, and Nvidia is also said to be looking at Intel as a backup chip builder. More recently, Reuters reported that SK Hynix is in talks with Intel to produce memory chips.
Nvidia sat the rally out, with its stock relatively flat during the same period, even as Intel and its rivals surged.
Over the last 12 months, Intel's stock is up 314%, versus AMD's 293% growth, while Nvidia has jumped 29%.
Sources: Yahoo Finance, Crypto Briefing
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