Key Highlights

● INTC shares fell 3.20% to $101.35 in Monday’s session, down from a $104.70 close on Friday, touching an intraday low of $100.71.

● Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan warned that access to capital could become the biggest constraint on AI growth.

● Second-quarter revenue rose 25% to $16.1 billion, but Intel lost $2.16 a share on a GAAP basis, and results are due after the close on October 29.

● Intel’s foundry posted an operating loss of about $2.1 billion, with external customers contributing only $293 million of revenue.

What pushed Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) onto the list of the most active US stocks on Monday was not a single company headline but a combination of sector-wide selling in semiconductors, fresh doubts about how the AI build-out will be financed, and comments from Intel’s own chief executive. Shares fell 3.20% to $101.35, down from a $104.70 close on Friday, and touched an intraday low of $100.71. About 73.71 million shares changed hands, worth roughly $7.47 billion, enough to rank tenth among US stocks by dollar volume. That volume was actually below normal, with relative volume at 0.77, so the stock’s place on the list reflects its large share count and high price rather than a frenzy of trading.

The day’s most widely cited theme came from a media report in which Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) CEO Hock Tan warned that access to capital, rather than shortages of chips, memory or power, could become the biggest constraint on AI growth. The two executives pointed to financing costs and the need to show returns on AI spending as a bigger risk than hardware supply. Coming from Intel’s own CEO, the warning landed at a sensitive moment.

Separately, Tan said Chinese frontier AI models such as DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM cost less per token, are being adopted “very fast,” and are “good enough.” Tan added that he is a strong believer in open source as a way to drive efficiency. Intel shares were down as much as 1.6% premarket.

A Chip Sector Already Under Pressure

Monday’s decline extended a rough stretch for semiconductors. Intel closed at $107.08 on October 8 after falling 5.34% that day, alongside Arm Holdings (NASDAQ:ARM) and Marvell Technology (NASDAQ:MRVL) in a selloff tied to a report questioning OpenAI’s revenue. Reports put OpenAI’s September annualized revenue near $50 billion, below an earlier figure of about $70 billion. The iShares Semiconductor ETF fell about 5% that week, its worst weekly showing in a month.

Other competitive headlines added to the mood. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) plans to roll out its own Maia 300 processors across its cloud in 2027 and has not announced an Intel manufacturing contract for the chip. China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies said it had made progress in advanced DRAM, a development that weighed on memory makers. Some read the move as profit-taking and pre-earnings risk reduction.

Intel did release product news on Monday. At the Open Compute Project Global Summit in Santa Clara, the company gave technical details on its GPU D-series, formerly code-named Crescent Island, an inference accelerator with up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X memory and 1.3 petaflops of FP8 compute in a 350-watt, air-cooled PCIe card. Intel said customer sampling is underway, but the news did not offset the broader selling.

What Intel Does

Intel designs, manufactures and sells processors and related products. It reports through three main segments: the Client Computing and Physical AI Group, which sells PC chips; Data Center and AI, which sells Xeon server processors and accelerators; and Intel Foundry, its manufacturing arm, which makes chips for Intel and is trying to win outside customers. Founded in 1968, the company has about 85,100 employees.

Latest Results and Guidance

In its second quarter, which ended June 27, Intel reported revenue of $16.1 billion, up 25% from a year earlier, which CEO Tan described as the strongest growth in more than fifteen years. Data Center and AI revenue jumped 59% to $6.3 billion, client revenue rose 13% to $8.9 billion, and foundry revenue climbed 31% to $5.8 billion. Non-GAAP gross margin was 41.8%, and adjusted earnings were $0.42 a share, roughly double the $0.21 consensus estimate. On a GAAP basis, however, Intel lost $2.16 a share, largely because of a $12.5 billion mark-to-market loss on escrowed shares tied to its agreement with the US government.

For the third quarter, Intel guided revenue to $15.8 billion to $16.8 billion, non-GAAP gross margin of 42.0% and non-GAAP earnings of $0.38 a share. Results are due after the close on October 29. Consensus expects about $16.4 billion in revenue, and the company has beaten revenue estimates in each of the last five quarters.

The foundry remains the weak spot. External customers contributed only $293 million of foundry revenue, while the segment posted an operating loss of about $2.1 billion. CFO David Zinsner said in August that Tan does not want to announce foundry customers, and Intel’s role in Elon Musk’s Terafab project remains defined mainly by public remarks rather than disclosed contract terms, especially after Musk said on October 3 that Terafab was in talks with TSMC (NYSE:TSM).

Valuation

Intel’s rally has left it priced for a strong recovery. Shares have traded between $32.89 and $142.35 over the past year, and the forward price-to-earnings ratio is about 60. Intel trades at 63 times next-twelve-month earnings, compared with 19 times for Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and 56 times for AMD (NASDAQ:AMD). Its price-to-sales multiple is roughly 9 times, against a historical median below 3 times. Trailing earnings are negative, at minus $2.12 a share, so a standard P/E is not meaningful. Wall Street remains split: one tally shows a consensus Hold rating with an average target of $109.06, while another shows an average target of about $118.

Bull Case vs. Bear Case

Bulls point to accelerating data center demand, a margin recovery of roughly 12 percentage points over the past year, new products on the Intel 18A process, and insider buying, including Tan’s purchase of 105,263 shares at $95 in August. There are also reports that Intel raised prices on high-end Panther Lake chips by up to 20%, a sign of pricing power. Bears focus on a foundry business that is still losing about $2 billion a quarter with few outside customers, heavy capital spending, consensus forecasts of negative free cash flow through 2027, rising custom-chip competition from hyperscalers, and a valuation that leaves little room for disappointment.

Intel’s October 29 Report and the Foundry Question

The October 29 report is the next major test. Investors will look at whether revenue lands near or above the top of guidance, whether gross margins hold around 42%, and what management says about 2027 capital spending, which Zinsner has said will rise significantly. Any concrete foundry customer news or clarity on Terafab would matter, as would further signs on whether AI customers can keep financing their data center plans. Traders are also watching the $100 level and the 200-day moving average, near $99.85.