Coming from an era when S&P 100 companies having 3% single day stock swings would be front page news what's happening today is hard to comprehend. Intel losing $150B market value, Google $480B, Microsoft $360B earlier this year, SpaceX $400B, Nvidia having several $500B+ swings in either direction... People are barely blinking at trillion-dollar companies gaining or losing a quarter of their value overnight.
To put things in perspective no company was worth $500B total around a decade ago.
At the same time, you can't argue that everything in our society has similarly improved. There is still a long way to go in providing more diverse access to the wealth generating markets.
I'm not sure what point you're even making. It has never been easier to access markets. It seems like the core problem is that most Americans don't have/save enough money to get rich from buying them, nor is there specifically any mandated formal education that gives any guidance on investing. I also know plenty of people from my small town America hometown that save their money in regular cash savings accounts, despite them having internet and easy access to put money in a brokerage account with their bank and buy equities.
Intel really doesn't have a great product range for AI, at least compared to NVIDIA and AMD.
Their server CPUs are quite competitive and relevant for agentic stuff, but AMD CPUs are arguably better and every hyperscaler (and NVIDIA) has their own ARM based CPU nowadays.
On the GPU/AI accelerator side, they have basically nothing. Gaudi is dead, all the Ponte * accelerators are heavily delayed, Xe based GPUs are not competitive.
On client (think gaming and office PCs), memory has gotten so expensive that nobody buys new machines right now.
I doubt it'll be enough to carry the company but I really hope Crescent Lake works well for them. A 120-480GB bigger Xe3p GPU is not going to be a speed demon but hopefully gives Strix Halo and Mac M5 Ultra a very good run for the money.
Again, not going to be "the" product to turn things around. But a very smart offering that no one else is doing, if they can price it ok. Which is barely in their control, given that it's once again overwhelmingly ram (by cost share).
Such a pity. Panther Lake and Wildcat are both really excellent chips. What a bad run of timing for an Intel that finally seems arising.
IMO all bets are off and nothing is going to make sense until after the elections and we know whether bombing returns to Iran or not. I wouldn’t make any moves until December, you may get lucky getting in/out of some positions but you most likely will not.
As for a cause, I read an article this morning about some kind of capex miss for Google, MSoft, Amazon and some AI revenue miss at ServiceNow and the analyst has declared the bubble pop underway. _Don’t read too much into that though_, analysts makes this claim and the inverse every single week.
Overhype, believing Intel is like the 486/Pentium Intel era with new AI boom. Think of it like dutch tulip mania, Netscape-Internet-Petdotcom mania or the recent 2008 CDO housing mania ... but chip mania that do AI. People realized that maybe AI is overglorified for now and any money they can make will still be decades away.
Seems that most articles agree that if you look at just the fundamentals, the only thing that was bad that Intel reported was that they're promising less profit next quarter than expected. Despite their server division booming, the PC crisis is holding them back a bit. But I don't know if this is a reason why it would drop this much, maybe companies are using this to price in them vastly overestimating Intel earlier this year or fears about the future of its AI division.
They also had guidance of negative cash flow for 2027. This is not what people like to hear. This is the same as Gelsinger betting the farm on 18a/foundry/etc. I think it's the right decision for the business but the numbers were never going to look good.
Intel was at $19 in August 2025 and is $66 today. The company is doing fine. All the swings in between are speculators/gamblers reacting when things don't go their way.
Intel also said half of their revenue was consumer sales and projected them to fall 20% soon. Meanwhile, they have limited offerings in the AI department and their gGPU market hasn't really taken a strong hold.
If it keeps going or spreads to other, unrelated businesses (no, I don't count 2-5% adjustments), that's something to notice, but this just seems like people reacting fairly expectedly to the content of the report?
But, as always, we'll see in the coming hours/days.
It's worth remembering that 5 years ago Intel was making close to 100b revenue at over 20% net margin. Whether they can again achieve this (or better) is the question, and depends on how much the total capex costs, how fast they can ramp up production, how long the data center capex spending lasts etc. It's possible their margins will never be that high again if they were the result of irresponsibly milking the business and not reinvesting. Tsmc has much better margins, though that may also not last if it's a result of lack of competition.
I would imagine that AI completely wrecking the consumer PC market is finally starting to show in real world value. I think it outpaced whatever other profits Intel was predicting to make.
I'm no economist or investor, but down 28% in a day seems insane for a company at this scale. And they didn't even perform badly, imagine what would happen if they missed their earnings projections.
They were crazy overvalued. In August 2025, they were trading below $20 (which was crazy undervalued). When things were going great for them in the past, they were in the mid 60's.
Trump strong armed some companies to make deals with Intel, and the market went crazy - taking it all the way up to $120. But performancewise, all their gains have been incremental. I know many who work there, and nothing has changed from a year ago - other than the infusion of cash from the deals. The products are still behind AMD and Nvidia. The fab is losing money at almost the same rate that caused their stock to drop from $50 to 25 some years ago ($8B loss then - likely still over $7B this year). Revenue has gone up incrementally, and is still way down from the peak some years ago.
To give you an idea, they had reduced their ESPP offering to no lookback period - to save money. Employees get a fixed 15% discount - that's it. Their LLM budget is about $10/day ($200/month) per employee. The layoffs started by Lip-Bu Tan never ended. It's just become continual. They are trying to find any possible way to save money. That hasn't changed.
Their current price at $64 is, at best, a fair price, and likely still a bit overvalued.
The single biggest/best thing Intel could do is get back into memory. Their entire remaining business is now throttled on everyone else being able to supply memory, on top of whatever other competition they were already experiencing.
There is no one reason for the tech route lately. But there are several causes as I see it:
1) Stocks priced for perfection. This applies mostly to Google that was priced to beat estimates. They did not and alot of people took that to mean Google was incorrectly priced and should have a multiple shift down.
2) worry about capital expenditures. Google was also guilty here as the market is starting to get worried about these companies getting over their skiis on cap ex. Microsoft did guide their capex lower but Google doubled down and said they'd spend even more. The market punished them for that.
to this point MSFT is only slightly down due more to the sector than the company as they did announce capex cuts for next year.
3) Intel just flat out failed to hit targets on their earnings that the market felt it should have been easy to do in this economy. And they got punished for it.
4) Most hedge funds and other large money managers have had decent allocations to the Mag7 and related companies as if you didn't have any tech exposure you would almost certainly outperform in the past 2-3 years.
This year we're starting to see a slow down or resetting of expectations for tech companies, Anthropic and Open AI seeing their IPO valuations get cut down is one large sign of this.
We've seen a large transition of hedge funds out of tech in the past 6 months that really accelerated with this earnings season.
None of this is to say that AI or the tech sector is going away. its more of a changing allocation of money out of this sector due to their valuations getting ahead of their economics.
Don't forget that share prices are set at the margin by the last trade executed between a buyer and a seller. Billions of shares of a stock could trade hands at $100/share, but if one share then trades hands at $1/share, the company's market capitalization at that moment is 99% lower, even though only one dollar changed hands.
Answering why the price went down requires understanding the process, mindset, motivations, fears, of every trader everywhere.
What are you trying to say exactly? Yes share prices are set by buyers and sellers (aka the market). This isn't a great revelation you are trying to make it to be.
Why not work as before (on 3D XPoint) with Micron and try to pursue PIM (processing in memory) on DRAM? It doesn't go around the DRAM manufacturing constraint, but it helps them sell new PIM-DRAM coupled to Xeons. Right now, they have "pie in the sky" GPUs and nVidia has their boot on their throat, while Xeons and let alone normal cpus are going down the drain.
Intel needs to innovate under constraints and, if history is to be reinterpreted, this won't end well for them. They need less management and to double-down on engineering and their lithography pipeline.
Not too surprised, Intel was trading at a PE of over 100. Although it looks like their PE has turned negative. Not a great look. Their stock might even continue falling.
48 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadTo put things in perspective no company was worth $500B total around a decade ago.
The demand for compute for AI is increasing, why would a compute producer lose value?
Their server CPUs are quite competitive and relevant for agentic stuff, but AMD CPUs are arguably better and every hyperscaler (and NVIDIA) has their own ARM based CPU nowadays.
On the GPU/AI accelerator side, they have basically nothing. Gaudi is dead, all the Ponte * accelerators are heavily delayed, Xe based GPUs are not competitive.
On client (think gaming and office PCs), memory has gotten so expensive that nobody buys new machines right now.
Again, not going to be "the" product to turn things around. But a very smart offering that no one else is doing, if they can price it ok. Which is barely in their control, given that it's once again overwhelmingly ram (by cost share).
Such a pity. Panther Lake and Wildcat are both really excellent chips. What a bad run of timing for an Intel that finally seems arising.
As for a cause, I read an article this morning about some kind of capex miss for Google, MSoft, Amazon and some AI revenue miss at ServiceNow and the analyst has declared the bubble pop underway. _Don’t read too much into that though_, analysts makes this claim and the inverse every single week.
If it keeps going or spreads to other, unrelated businesses (no, I don't count 2-5% adjustments), that's something to notice, but this just seems like people reacting fairly expectedly to the content of the report?
But, as always, we'll see in the coming hours/days.
Trump strong armed some companies to make deals with Intel, and the market went crazy - taking it all the way up to $120. But performancewise, all their gains have been incremental. I know many who work there, and nothing has changed from a year ago - other than the infusion of cash from the deals. The products are still behind AMD and Nvidia. The fab is losing money at almost the same rate that caused their stock to drop from $50 to 25 some years ago ($8B loss then - likely still over $7B this year). Revenue has gone up incrementally, and is still way down from the peak some years ago.
To give you an idea, they had reduced their ESPP offering to no lookback period - to save money. Employees get a fixed 15% discount - that's it. Their LLM budget is about $10/day ($200/month) per employee. The layoffs started by Lip-Bu Tan never ended. It's just become continual. They are trying to find any possible way to save money. That hasn't changed.
Their current price at $64 is, at best, a fair price, and likely still a bit overvalued.
Now GPUs are sitting idle or are not even installed:
https://www.hpcwire.com/aiwire/2026/04/21/companies-are-raci...
It was all a big lie and AI bros who ruined a vibrant Silicon Valley economy can all go to hell.
More puzzling is the sale of other stocks that actually do.
1) Stocks priced for perfection. This applies mostly to Google that was priced to beat estimates. They did not and alot of people took that to mean Google was incorrectly priced and should have a multiple shift down.
2) worry about capital expenditures. Google was also guilty here as the market is starting to get worried about these companies getting over their skiis on cap ex. Microsoft did guide their capex lower but Google doubled down and said they'd spend even more. The market punished them for that.
to this point MSFT is only slightly down due more to the sector than the company as they did announce capex cuts for next year.
3) Intel just flat out failed to hit targets on their earnings that the market felt it should have been easy to do in this economy. And they got punished for it.
4) Most hedge funds and other large money managers have had decent allocations to the Mag7 and related companies as if you didn't have any tech exposure you would almost certainly outperform in the past 2-3 years.
This year we're starting to see a slow down or resetting of expectations for tech companies, Anthropic and Open AI seeing their IPO valuations get cut down is one large sign of this.
We've seen a large transition of hedge funds out of tech in the past 6 months that really accelerated with this earnings season.
None of this is to say that AI or the tech sector is going away. its more of a changing allocation of money out of this sector due to their valuations getting ahead of their economics.
Answering why the price went down requires understanding the process, mindset, motivations, fears, of every trader everywhere.
FWIW I am the latter, and sold last week while it was still positive.
it's gonna get real ugly soon...
Intel needs to innovate under constraints and, if history is to be reinterpreted, this won't end well for them. They need less management and to double-down on engineering and their lithography pipeline.