On June 30, Jim Cramer told Mad Money viewers his favorite stock is a company most people wrote off two years ago. “Intel, currently my favorite stock. CEO Lip-Bu Tan has turned this company around,” he said. He dismissed the mega-cap AI hyperscalers in favor of the chipmaker they all now depend on. The pick reflects a broader thesis he laid out the same night: “Wall street is now rewarding tech companies with products in high demand and punishing their customers.”
Why Cramer flipped on Intel
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC | INTC Price Prediction) has become the loudest turnaround story in semis. The stock is up 278.4% year to date and 523.35% over the past year. A $22 broken-tech name has become something Cramer describes as a national treasure. CEO Lip-Bu Tan took over when the stock was near $20 and has since delivered six consecutive quarters of revenue above expectations.
The Q1 fiscal 2026 print, released April 23, 2026, showed the acceleration. Revenue came in at $13.577 billion, up 7.2% year over year. The Data Center and AI segment grew 22% year over year to $5.052 billion, and Intel Foundry revenue rose 16% to $5.421 billion. Non-GAAP EPS of $0.29 blew past the $0.0127 consensus. Details in the Q1 8-K spell out the mechanics.
Three growth engines Cramer wants you to see
Cramer laid out three legs to the Intel story. First, CPUs remain essential for AI inference, and Tan himself said “The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user, moving from foundational models to inference to agentic. This shift is significantly increasing the need for Intel’s CPUs and wafer and advanced packaging offerings.” Second is advanced packaging and automotive, where margins run hot.
Third is the foundry, which is finally moving. Intel 18A ramped to high-volume manufacturing in Arizona and Oregon, and Intel Xeon 6 was selected as host CPU for NVIDIA’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) DGX Rubin NVL8 systems. Moreover, add the $5 billion NVIDIA equity investment and the $5.7 billion CHIPS Act disbursement, and the balance sheet looks nothing like the one investors were panicking about a year ago.
Furthermore, insider behavior lines up with the narrative. CFO David Zinsner acquired 37,015 shares of common stock on June 1, 2026, and the endpoint counted 47 recent insider transactions with a net buying direction.
The memory boom Cramer is riding alongside
Cramer’s Intel pick sits inside a larger frame he keeps repeating: “The spend can only be defended by profitability, not press release.” That is why memory suppliers are getting retail flows. Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) reported fiscal Q3 revenue of $41.456 billion, up 345.7% year over year, with non-GAAP EPS of $25.11 and gross margin at 84.6%. Guidance for the following quarter calls for $50 billion in revenue. The stock is up 304.62% year to date.
SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) has rallied even harder, up 857.84% year to date on datacenter revenue up 645% year over year. Cramer’s line about memory names tripling in three months tracks with the tape.
The customers are taking the punishment
The flip side of Cramer’s thesis lives in the compute chipmakers. Marvell Technology (NASDAQ:MRVL), which Jensen Huang has flagged as a potential trillion-dollar company, is up 250.96% year to date on custom-silicon tailwinds. AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) sits up 171.25% year to date, with Lisa Su leaning into the Meta deal for up to 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs. Both are winning and volatile, and Cramer warns they could get repriced if hyperscaler capex slows without earnings to justify it.
Intel’s path forward runs through shipping 18A wafers, landing more Xeon sockets in Rubin racks, and keeping foundry losses shrinking. Cramer thinks Tan is doing exactly that. At a forward multiple of 152x and an analyst target of $98.50 against a current price near $127.92, the question is how much of the comeback is already in the tape.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Top Gaining Stocks
Top Losing Stocks