From $24 to $109: Intel’s Comeback Is Real. The Price Tag Is Now the Problem
Intel's stock has surged over 250% in a year, NVIDIA just took a $5 billion stake, and the CEO is calling it the strongest revenue growth in fifteen years. So why does Wall Street's consensus still say hold?
Intel (NASDAQ:INTC | INTC Price Prediction) has gone from a low-twenties stock that missed the AI wave to a name trading at $108.60, a 255.25% one-year run.
The operational fix under CEO Lip-Bu Tan is genuine, and NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) validated it by taking a $5 billion equity stake in Q3 2025. The debate has shifted from whether Intel can be fixed to whether the share price has already spent the fix.
Q2 revenue reached $16.13 billion, up 25.4% year over year, beating consensus by 11.64%. Non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.42 versus a $0.22 estimate.
Data Center and AI revenue hit $6.26 billion, up 59%, with Xeon 6 selected as host CPU for NVIDIA’s DGX Rubin NVL8 systems.
Tan called the quarter Intel’s “strongest revenue growth in more than fifteen years”, and Intel 18A entered high-volume manufacturing.
Where Intel Stands Against AMD and NVIDIA
Against Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), Intel is finally landing punches in server CPUs, with management saying “strong demand for our products continue to outpace our growing supply.”
Against NVIDIA, the relationship has flipped from rivalry to partnership on the CPU side, but NVIDIA’s AI-compute franchise remains the reason Intel Foundry still lost $2.1 billion last quarter.
External Foundry revenue was only $293 million, a rounding error next to the manufacturing bill Intel is carrying.
Valuation Is Now Doing the Heavy Lifting
Market cap sits at roughly $574 billion on a forward P/E of 57x, with trailing EPS still negative at -$2.09.
Wall Street’s mean target of $116.37 sits barely above spot, and the consensus is a Hold with 32 holds against 14 buys.
The 2027 EPS range runs from $1.15 to $3.44, a dispersion that suggests the market is guessing how fast Foundry losses fade.
Bull and Bear Case for INTC Stock
Bulls point to Melius, which values the parts at near $200 and floats a possible foundry separation around 2030. If 14A lands customers and Foundry losses narrow, that math survives.
Bears note that Intel still posted a $11.03 billion GAAP net loss last quarter, that Foundry burns $2.1 billion to $2.5 billion per quarter, and that a 57x forward multiple leaves no room for a stumble on 18A yields or Panther Lake ramp costs.
The deciding variable is external Foundry commitments on 14A. Without them, Intel is priced as a finished turnaround while still being fixed.
Even though the earnings multiple is high, if you’re very bullish on the AI buildout, going for INTC stock is not a bad idea today. If you look multiple years into the future, Intel still has growth potential left if AI causes chip demand to continue growing explosively. That said, this remains a more optimistic scenario than what most analysts are pricing in. Revenue growth is expected to fall to 19% annually in 2027. Nvidia should comfortably grow much more than that despite being massively larger. And it’s also cheaper.
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Omor Ibne Ehsan is a writer at 24/7 Wall St. He is a self-taught investor with a focus on growth, cyclical, and dividend equities that have strong fundamentals, value, and long-term potential. He also has an interest in high-risk, high-reward investments such as penny stocks.
