Today was a huge win for chip stock Intel (INTC), as it cleared a milestone that six months ago might have seemed impossible. Intel hit a new all-time high in intraday trading today, crossing the $85.22 mark at one point. It backtracked a bit since then, but a win was a win. Intel shares were up over 21% in Friday afternoon’s trading.
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Intel investor Thomas Hayes of Great Hill Capital noted to Bloomberg Television, “Everyone is starting to direct orders to Intel, and I think we are in the early days. This has gone from despondency to euphoria in a very short period of time.”
Indeed, a lot of those orders are coming Intel’s way, as the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race pivots away from graphics processing units (GPUs) and converts to central processing units (CPUs), which both currently are and have been for decades Intel’s bread and butter. But Intel knows that these gains could reverse at any time, which is why it made clear that it was “laser-focused” on firing up its production operations to keep up with surging demand.
Wildcat Lake in the Wild
Further exciting news—though not the kind that causes a 20% surge in stock prices—hit as the first laptop powered by Intel’s Wildcat Lake processor line recently arrived. It is designed to compete with Apple’s (AAPL) MacBook Neo, reports note, and does so with a combination of entry-level value and edge power.
The laptop boasts an aluminum chassis, which is a far cry from the plastics normally seen. But this aluminum chassis device also turns out to be a power sipper, offering up a fanless mode that runs on just 11 watts of power. The device runs on two Cougar Cove P-cores backed up by four Darkmont E-cores. There are actually seven different versions of this laptop out there, each offering a little something different for different use cases.
Is Intel a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on INTC stock based on 10 Buys, 21 Holds and three Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 233.07% rally in its share price over the past year, the average INTC price target of $76 per share implies 6.01% downside risk.
