Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and Arm Holdings soared Monday as investors got excited about the potential growth of central-processing units. The trigger looks to be the popularity of Meta Platforms' Muse artificial-intelligence agent.
The rally pushed AMD to close with a market valuation above $1 trillion, making it the 14th U.S. company to reach that mark. The stock rose 9.9% to $615.52 on Monday, hitting its first record close since June 30, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Intel stock and Arm's American depositary receipts saw even bigger moves, advancing 12% and 17%, respectively.
After a blistering run early in the year on the back of CPU demand to power AI services, Intel and Arm fell back in the second half of summer. But the early success of the Muse agent-which has been the most downloaded free application on the iPhone in the U.S. for the past three days, according to Sensor Tower-is reigniting excitement.
The point about AI agents which can act autonomously is that they massively boost demand for chips to perform inference, the process of running models-and that needs CPUs. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said last week that the company can only meet about 50% of customer demands.
Arm has estimated the server CPU market can grow at over 35% annually, reaching $120 billion by 2030. AMD is more optimistic-it projects server CPUs could grow 50% through 2030, creating a $220 billion revenue opportunity.
Agents have already had something of a moment this year with the viral success of OpenClaw, an open-source AI assistant project. However, OpenClaw could be tricky to set up for users without technical knowledge and its chief developer was subsequently recruited by OpenAI. Muse is a lot more accessible and Meta has a lot more developers to throw at improving its capabilities.
"In our view, Meta's distribution and data advantage give Muse an advantage on day one," wrote KeyBanc analyst Justin Patterson in a research note. "If Muse can build a monthly (and ideally, daily or weekly) audience in the hundreds of millions over the coming months, we believe this would be deemed a success."
Of course there are still a few obstacles. Amazon.com has blocked the ability of Meta's Muse AI agent to make purchases on its site, saying it wasn't informed of the plans to give it access to its platform.
"We think it's fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate," an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we've requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience."
Still the fact the e-commerce giant felt the need to take such a step points to the rapid adoption of Muse. And if AI agents boom, then so will CPU demand-which is good news for Intel, Arm, and AMD.
Intel is one of Barron's picks for 2026 and is up 194% this year through Friday's close, and up 278% over the past 12 months.
Tigress Financial Partners analyst Ivan Feinseth recently raised his target price on Intel to $145 from $118, while reiterating a Buy rating.
"AI is restoring the importance of INTC's x86 CPU franchise because inference, agentic AI, data orchestration, networking, and enterprise workloads require substantial general-purpose processing alongside accelerated computing," wrote Feinseth.
