Intel's stock hasn't been this hot in 38 years. It now has a 'renewed lease on life.'

MW Intel's stock hasn't been this hot in 38 years. It now has a 'renewed lease on life.'

By Britney Nguyen

Intel stands to benefit from a CPU boom and a growing array of partnerships, but an analyst notes it's 'not out of the woods yet'

Intel's stock is looking to lock in its eighth day in a row of gains.

As Intel's stock rises for the eighth session in a row, one analyst notes that the company seems to have "a renewed lease on life."

The company has struck recent partnership arrangements that have investors excited. Plus, while central processing units were once seen as somewhat of an afterthought in the artificial-intelligence era, those chips are now in hot demand, and Intel $(INTC)$ is a major manufacturer of them.

"Six months ago we were questioning the company's existence, but they now seem to have turned an important corner," Seaport Research's Jay Goldberg said in a note to clients on Friday.

Intel's partnership with Elon Musk's Terafab - which aims to manufacture chips for Tesla $(TSLA)$, xAI and SpaceX - could end up winning the chip maker some business, Goldberg said, even as he acknowledged that details of the arrangement remain murky.

And earlier this week, Intel announced a deepening of its work with Google $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ to provide future generations of its Xeon processors and to continue co-developing custom infrastructure processing units, or IPUs.

That's another supportive signal, according to Goldberg.

Intel's stock is up 0.7% in Friday trading and ahead 50.8% across its current eight-session stretch of gains. If current gains hold through the close, that would seal the stock's best eight-day performance since November 1987, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

See more: Intel's stock is set to extend its hot streak. Here's the company's latest win.

Meanwhile, interest in server CPUs has surged thanks to the rise of agentic AI, which depends on the chips to run. That has led to supply shortages, which "are working in [Intel's] favor," Goldberg said.

He expects Intel to be supply-constrained in this part of the business for the first half of this year, before the benefits really kick in in the latter half of 2026. Demand for CPUs also may help Intel's foundry business, he said, as the company is looking to attract external customers there.

Read: Intel's stock has been climbing - and this could be its next big catalyst

Benchmark analyst Cody Acree said Google's deal for Intel's CPUs shows that its x86 chip architecture "still has a durable role inside hyperscale infrastructure" despite competition from Nvidia's (NVDA) Arm-based $(ARM)$ Grace CPUs and other alternatives.

Additionally, the custom IPUs are "strategically important," Acree said, because they push Intel beyond just being a CPU supplier and position the company for a role as an "infrastructure co-architect." That could drive stickier customer relationships.

And the Terafab collaboration "serves as meaningful symbolic validation" that Intel's 18A chip process node is gaining credibility on the commercial side, Acree added.

"In combination, we believe that is the right setup for a higher-valuation framework for Intel's shares," Acree said in his Friday note.

Still, Goldberg noted, "Intel is not out of the woods yet."

The chip maker's "long-term survival" depends on how well it can revamp Intel Foundry to support manufacturing chips for customers, he said, but Intel's not quite there yet.

"The company still has several years of technical work to do to get its critical 14A process viable," he said, referring to Intel's next-generation process node that it will build future chips on. Wall Street sees 14A as crucial to Intel's ability to gain an edge in chip manufacturing.

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Nevertheless, Goldberg said he expects interest in Intel's foundry to grow across the chip industry. It already has customers lined up, he said, such as Microsoft $(MSFT)$, Amazon.com (AMZN), Nvidia, MediaTek and the U.S. Department of Defense.

-Britney Nguyen

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April 10, 2026 12:56 ET (16:56 GMT)

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